I was worrying the pit in my gums where Les had knocked my front tooth out, poking and prodding with my tongue. Across from me on the facing bench seat, Boon stared out the window with the cowboy’s watch clutched in one hand, watching the territories flit by as the locomotive trundled west. She’d had to waste the tickets she’d bought the first time and spend a considerable chunk of her poke to get her hands on the bay gelding and pack mule that carried her out to the Staked Plains, and once we made it to another stop along the tracks—not Revelation, of course, which would not have rolled out a welcoming party complete with brass band—she sold those animals and reinvested in new tickets. Each transaction left her a little broker than she was before, but we’d made the train this time around. The chief difference now was in the cash and coin we’d pilfered from the pockets of dead men, back east beneath the shadows of the Caprock Escarpment. Probably we didn’t get everything they’d had on them, being in the hurry we were in. But if nothing else, we’d be able to sleep in clean beds when next we disembarked, wherever that would be.
And to think we’d been so flush there for a moment, back in Darling with two hundred dollars in double eagles. Easy come, easy go.
I dozed a bit, nodding in and out as the monotonous clank and grind of the piston rods and valves beneath us lulled me, and the whistle screeched to snap me back awake again. All the while, Boon clamped her long, slender fingers down on that watch and gazed at the gathering dark over the rise and fall of the Southern Rockies in the distance. Whether or not she actually saw them, rather than whatever was playing out inside her head, was another matter altogether.
I was in one of the dozing spells when she woke me to say, “Remember Percy Watkins?”
At first I did not. I was groggy, and a hell of a lot had gone down since last I thought of the fellow in San Francisco she’d butchered at the dawn of her life’s mission. Only when she made a cutting motion at her crotch did all the pieces come together in my mind. A shudder rocked up my spine and I said, “Oh, sure. That jasper.”
“My first,” she said.
“I remember you saying.”
“What about yours,” she said.
It was not Boon’s habit to ask me a lot of questions about my life, and most of what I’d told her was because it was my habit to run my mouth when the quiet made me too nervous to stand it. On account of this, I was more than a little surprised by the question, and still more so that she didn’t already know the answer, given my reaction to it at the time.
Because she was right there when it happened. Well, she did not witness the event, but she was close enough to hand. I’d missed the war, and the only lives I’d ever taken in all my days before Boon arrived were chickens, hogs, and the odd cottonmouth or copperhead here and there. But Christmas Day of 1871 was the first Christmas I’d spent with anybody I much cared for in a damned long time, and it was also the first time I ever found cause to kill another human being. That she had never known this to be the case alarmed me some, for I now wondered whether I gave the impression that it hadn’t hit me like God’s own fist right in the breadbasket. It surely did.
Never mind how badly Red Chester Stamp deserved it.
Stamp wasn’t an Indian, and he wasn’t called “Red” for being Irish-colored, either. In fact, his hair was coal-black and skin sallow, unfreckled. He dressed in white and black every time I ever saw him (which wasn’t much or often), like a circuit preacher, which was exactly what he claimed to be. The appellation “Red,” according to Chester Stamp, derived from the color of God’s righteous anger at the wicked sinners on all the Earth in general and Texas in particular. Among their number, it so happened, I was counted. Boon was too, but she was beyond salvation and beneath contempt, being a “breed.” In the eyes of Red Chester Stamp, only I was within reach of the glorious and everlasting Kingdom of God, if only I would raise my hand up and take it.
She still wasn’t looking at me after she’d asked about it, the Rockies turning a spooky pinkish purple before the slow setting sun through the window of our car. It almost seemed like she hadn’t meant to say it out loud, or that she wasn’t aware she had. I cleared my throat a little and rooted around in my coat pockets until I found the small bottle of clear Mexican mescal I’d purchased from a pock-faced drummer before boarding that morning. Train-riding wasn’t any kind of thirsty business like horse-riding, but I wasn’t looking for an excuse to take a nip or two. I just wanted it.
“You remember that preacher man,” I said after swallowing my dose of medicine and jamming the cork back into the neck. “Red Stamp.”
“Red Chester,” she said. “By God, he was your first.”
It wasn’t a question. She was just marveling over the revelation. In a way, I was surprised she recalled him at all.
“He was,” I said, savoring the liquor but not the memory.
Red Chester Stamp got started on his circuit after the big flood of ’69, or at least that was the first anyone had heard of him, according to the Caddo scout we’d hitched up with in Bastrop, southeast of Austin. Nayawsa’, who locally went by the name of Thomas Song, was recommended to us by my favorite Bastrop bartender, who told Boon that Thomas had done a fair bit of scouting for the Army under one General Augur and that there wasn’t hardly a square inch of Texas that Thomas didn’t know like the Devil knew Scripture. More than this, Thomas Song was reputed to be a man with information, or ways to get it. Thomas came into that very bar later the same evening, and as it happened, it was he who directed us north to the panhandle, where in time we made our acquaintance with good old Tom Willocks.
That same evening, we also encountered Red Chester Stamp, who Thomas laughingly called the Wet Preacher, on account of his history of traveling by canoe on the floodwaters by torchlight, shouting Bible verses at the top of his lungs in the dead at night. That appellation carried with it a double-meaning, too—Red Chester was as much a drunk as he was a lunatic. I’d been putting them back for the better part of two hours with Thomas Song before Stamp ever set foot in the place, and within the span of another hour the preacher was drunker than the two of us combined.
I had seen him around, and so had Boon. Once or twice he had shouted at us. But only at a distance.
Thomas said to me, “Just make sure you don’t look him in the eye.”
“Why,” I said, “he going to mesmerize me?”
“You look the Wet Preacher in the eye, you won’t never get rid of ’im.”
That struck me as funny, in the way that things a man wouldn’t normally find all that funny get to be outright hilarious when he’s in his cups. I was in my cups, all right, and it got me to chuckling, and I forgot all about what Thomas Song said near as soon as he’d said it. That was when I turned on my stool and looked that mad preacher right in his wide, rheumy blue eyes.
And Stamp bellowed, “Sinner God damned hell-spawn!”
Which was a hell of way to say hello, to my mind. In lieu of reply, I raised my glass to him and turned back to Thomas, who said, “You’ve done it.”
Before I could ask what exactly it was I had done, I felt the preacher’s hand clamp down on my shoulder and smelled his noxious breath close to my face.
He hissed, “You are riding straight for hell, friend. Say the word, and I can help you.”
I set the glass back on the bar and swept his hand from my shoulder. Stamp grunted, stumbled, and righted himself by gripping the edge of the bar. I turned again, and again I met his bleary gaze.
“I am not your friend,” I said. “And I do not want your help.”
“There are fallen women here,” he said conspiratorially, rolling his eyes around the place. Indeed, like so many taverns of its like I had visited in my days, this one doubled as a whorehouse with a small, if less than alluring, assortment of working girls lounging around the downstairs in search of clientele.
“You don’t say,” I said. “Thanks for the tip, then. I’ll be grateful to you once I’ve had my poke of one or two.”
Thomas Song laughed hard at that, in spite of himself. Red Chester Stamp did not.
“Then I see that you are lost already,” he fumed. “Lost to all the devils of hell, God damn your rotten black soul.”
I could find no reason to further bait the old lunatic, so I kept my back to him and resumed drinking and talking with Thomas. Boon, to the best of my knowledge, remained in her rented room at the hotel across town, studying maps or resting for the journey ahead. From what Thomas Song had to tell us of the movements of cow men and ex-Confederates both, it seemed likely we were to leave Texas post haste and roam northwest, to Wyoming. Men who sounded very much like Arthur Stanley were going there in droves.
Of course, different intelligence quashed those plans in little time, and my night of revelry with the Caddo scout soon went from sour to hellish. Sour because that damnable preacher would not leave the saloon, moving from table to table trying out his act on every cowhand, drummer, timberman, drunk, and whore he could corner. Hellish because the moment he spied me climbing the stairs with my chosen company for the night, a fat blonde with enormous teeth and sparkling green eyes who called herself Billie Lynn, Red Chester Stamp got filled up with his God’s righteous wrath and came barreling toward us.
In his left hand he brandished a worn, water-damaged, leather-bound Bible. In his right, a wood chisel maybe six or eight inches long.
“Whoremonger,” he screeched. “Jezebel! I’ll send the both of you to hell, God damn you.”
Despite what many have heard about the average Texas tavern, it was not always the case that every man in such a place came heeled and expecting trouble. The truth was far less interesting and would never have made the papers and novels back east, for in fact that Bastrop saloon was more typical than not and when that preacher came sprinting at us with the chisel in his fist, everybody within spitting distance was so shocked that nobody said or did anything but watch. Even had any man present wished to draw on the madman, they could not have; the saloon had a strict ordinance pertaining to firearms, which was none were allowed except for the 12-gauge in the lookout’s hands.
This meant, of course, that I was unarmed. I had a rifle in those days—not the Winchester .44-40, but a nice enough Springfield—which was under lock and key alongside everybody else’s iron. Rule of the house was you got it back once you were settled up and outside the doors. To hear the bartender tell it, the proprietor ended up keeping half of them on account of men drinking up more than they could afford on such a regular basis. I hadn’t, not as yet, but that Springfield still wasn’t doing me a lick of damn good where it was. To make things still worse, my Arkansas toothpick was back at the hotel in its sheath. And for a cadaverous old bastard with his sunken face and oily black hair, that Red Chester could move but fast.
Billie Lynn fainted outright. Her great bulk hit the bottom landing of the stairs so hard the railing shook. I had to grab the bannister to keep from falling over, myself. In hindsight, falling might have been the best thing for it. Instead, I seized that bannister with one hand and threw the other one up to protect my face. As strategies went, it was a piss-poor one, but time was not on my side.
While I waited for the chisel to stick me, a dark blur sped between me and Stamp and when I heard him wail in anger and pain, I realized that it was Thomas Song. The poor fool had sprung into action to save my hide, and in the process got most of the preacher’s makeshift weapon stuck between his ribs.
Thomas, in his buckskin coat and store-bought trousers, shiny rattlesnake-skin boots and hair like a magpie’s wing, crumpled to the floor as though all his bones had turned to ash. The whole front of him was awash with blood, and his smooth, boyish face puckered into a twisted mask of agony. I had not known him quite long enough to consider him a great friend, but I liked Nayawsa’ a good deal more than most men I’d ever met. And it was not as though white men carrying Bibles hadn’t caused his people enough grief already.
I guess I saw red. Looking back, it seems as though I really, literally did—that the whole of the saloon and everything in it turned the same glassy, dark red as the blood pulsing out of Thomas Song’s chest. It was a saying I’d heard plenty before but it never occurred to me that there was any truth in it. Red, red, red.
And slow. In those days you’d always hear tell of gunfighters, faster than lightning to the man looking on and yet to them it all happened slow as molasses. I was no gunfighter and I had no gun, but it was for sure like that. I could see the other men rising from their chairs and stools, the lookout spinning ’round up front by the doors, 12-gauge in his hands, a scatter of hats and coats and boots, all of it slowed down to a crawl around me. But me? I was fast.
So fast I hardly knew what I was doing until it was done. And what I did was yank that sticker out of Thomas’s ribs and jam it as hard as I could right into that crazy son of a bitch’s mouth. When I let go of the hilt, my hand was tacky with blood and Red Chester Stamp was trying to scream with that chisel stuck clean through the back of his neck. The preacher dropped down, smashing the small of his back against a chair and breaking it on his way to the floor. He twitched and squirmed like he was all filled through with the Holy Spirit and dancing to beat the Dutch. The blood kept coming out of him, too—more blood than I’d ever reckoned a single man could keep in his body until that night. So much damned blood I doubt they ever got it all off of that floor.
And still that cruel, wild bastard did not die. Not right then, anyway. A couple of men carried Thomas out of the place to a sawbones up the street, but he was dead by the time they reached the doc’s front door. Red Chester Stamp, on the other hand, hung on for another two and a half days, which I spent sitting in the Bastrop city jail awaiting the arrival of a judge from Austin, who aimed to hold a preliminary hearing to figure it all out. I’d have run once that red mist cleared away in the saloon, but the lookout had that scattergun on me before I knew up from down.
It was the judge who informed me of Stamp’s passing, to which I said, “I am sore sorry I could not have watched him die.”
“I expect I understand how you feel,” the judge said. “And given the circumstances, which was witnessed by a fair half of the men in this town, I can’t say as you committed any crime necessitating further inquiry, never you mind punishment or recompense.”
I thought that amounted to a lot of fancy words and asked the judge was I free to go, and he agreed that I was. Boon had been visiting me on the regular the entire time they had me sitting in that little cell—which was a damn sight nicer than the ones they had in Revelation, New Mexico—and she was there when the judge from Austin made his last appearance in my life. She’d heard the whole story as I explained it to the city marshal first and the judge second, and she’d heard a passel of witnesses come through the office upstairs to corroborate every word I’d said. So, when at last we were riding away from that place on what we reckoned, incorrectly, was our way to Wyoming, she asked me if I’d ever killed a man with a tool like that before.
“No,” I told her. “I have not.”
It was only those two years and some days later, on the train through the Southern Rockies to the Golden Gate of San Francisco, that she learned Red Chester Stamp was in fact the first man I’d ever killed at all.
“Hell’s bells,” she said to that. “Way it sounded, I had you made for a seasoned killer even then.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I just couldn’t stand what had been done to my friend.”
“Good to have a friend like that,” Boon said. I could have sworn she smiled a little, or almost.
“Glad you think so, Boon. I’m sure glad.”