King of Spades (10 page)

Ransom smiled.

“Don't worry, boy. With your looks, the girls at The Stinging Lizard'll come cooing around you like doves after corn.”

“Ha.”

“Now listen to me, you. When you've finally decided which one you want, this is what you do. You sweet-talk her about some gold you've found. You know. Gold, gold!”

“We haven't found any yet.”

Sam stomped around. “Dammit, boy, will you listen to me?”

“All right.”

“Gold, gold! Do that and pretty soon your gal will lean toward you like a sore-eyed kitten to a basin of milk.”

“What if I don't love her?”

“Pah! Love will go where it is sent.”

Ransom's lower lip came out. It showed pink, full, almost like an extra tongue under his black gambler's mustache.

“And don't worry, boy. From what I heard that wagon master say, the one that rode with Custer all over the Black Hills, there's gold a-laying there between them slabs of rock as thick as cheese in a sandwich.”

“There better be.”

They went down through the lobby. The air was heavy with the odors of pipe tobacco, whiskey, new corduroys, sweated leathers. In the wide doorway they stepped around a fat man looking at a watch as big as a biscuit. Two blue soldiers, leaning against a porch post, stood as if put there to hold it up.

Clouds of brown moved down the street, going from west to east, as much dusk as dust. Sometimes starlight caught a floating mote just right and made it glint like gold, an infinitesimal atom of it. Oxen droppings gave off a pervasive stinging smell. Occasionally a fiber of horse dung stuck on the edge of a wet lip, sometimes went up the nostril like a lost bit of snuff. The sound of clopping horse hoofs, rattling wheels, irregular squealing dry axles filled the air. Mares
bugled for lost colts, geldings for lost studhood, mules for lost ancestry. Over it all, like a floating net, up and down, loose and taut, rode the ceaseless veil of human talk.

A gallows reared against the fleshen sky on the west end of Main Street. A single humped question mark hung dangling between its wooden parentheses.

Ransom and Sam turned right. Their heels made low stumping sounds on the hollow boardwalk.

They passed a stagecoach office, a Chinese laundry, an opera house, a blacksmith shop, a gun shop.

The doors to all the stores were jammed with floaters: railhead tramps, buffalo hunters, trappers, bullwhackers, miners, old mountain men, cowboys, soldiers, Indians, half-breeds, gamblers, promoters, lawyers, gunmen. Everybody wore a weapon of some kind, gun, rifle, knife. There were continual surges of raw laughter and raw talk and raw song.

“A real Saturday-night town,” Sam commented. “Wild and woolly and hard to curry.”

“With never a Sunday to worry about,” Ransom added.

“Nor any excommunications.”

“God sure must've raked out the bottom of hell to outfit this place.”

“That he did.”

“Denver is heaven compared to this.”

“Now, yes. But twenty years ago, no.”

“Was Denver really tough then?”

“It was. And in some ways worse. There was more money there. By a long ways. This is only a jump-off place.” Sam smiled out of his massy gray beard. “But wait'll you see the town we'll build us in the Black Hills when the new gold stampede is really on.”

“I can hardly wait.”

“You are in a hurry, ain't y'u?”

“I aim to get rich quick. There's a lot of things I want to do before I die. I feel it in my bones that I'm meant for something big.”

“
There's plenty of time.”

They strolled past the swank brick Cactus Club. Two English dandies were taking it easy in a big swing on the wide veranda. They were tippling wine and smoking long cigars. They looked upon the turmoil of the street with brow-raised hauteur.

Sam muttered. “There's got to be a lot of money around somewhere for them classy bastards to be here.”

“They're mostly interested in ranching, I hear.”

“Maybe.”

They stepped into the Hub of Hell for a drink. Hurdy-gurdy girls, tinhorn gamblers, road agents, prospectors milled around inside the place like whirling swill in the bottom of a bucket.

The barkeep asked, “What'll it be, gents? Speak right up.”

“Some good red American whiskey. Long ones,” Sam said.

“A ticket to hell for two.”

A buckskin hunter standing down the bar watched Ransom take a reluctant sip of his drink at the same time that he saw Sam throw his down. The hunter smoked a corncob pipe. When Ransom took yet a second slow sip, the hunter removed his corncob and asked Ransom, “First time in town, bub?”

“This town, yes.”

“Don't be afraid of it. It's as good a place as any to get your family jewels shined.”

Sam lit up another long fat cigar. “That's what I say, boy. Let go of them brakes.”

Ransom shook his head. “No. I'm afraid I'm already headed downhill when it comes to liquor.”

The hunter closed his eyes upon his own thoughts.

Later, when no one was looking, Ransom quietly emptied what was left of his drink into Sam's glass.

They next pushed through the swing doors of The Golden Man. It was the hangout for three-card monte men, graying Civil War vets, and remittance men down on their uppers.

“What'll it be, pardner?” the barkeep asked.

“Some good red American whiskey.”

“I better warn you we sell the worst whiskey in captivity.”

“That's why we came. We like honest whiskey.”

“Drinks for a couple of the boys who want to play their harps with a hammer.”

Again Ransom sipped reluctantly while Sam drank up.

A blue soldier wearing a black hat stood across the turn of the bar from them. He sneered at Ransom. “A one and only wonder, I see.”

Sam turned a serious beard on the soldier boy. “What was that?”

“Your sidekick here wouldn't slap at a botfly even if 'twas laying an egg in one of his balls, I suppose.”

Sam whispered under a hand, “Watch it, soldier. Don't let the kid's looking like a greenhorn fool you. He's got a temper like a hot springs geyser. Just take a gander at his gun. See it all notched up like a corncob there?”

The soldier looked at the handle of Ransom's gun, then at Ransom's hand.

“By the way,” Sam said, “is the Army gonna keep us out of the Black Hills?”

“I don't know.”

Ransom poured what was left of his drink in the soldier's glass.

“Hey!”

Sam laughed.

The soldier cried, “Who said you could throw your swill into my glass?”

Again Sam laughed. “Consider it a compliment, friend.”

They strolled out onto the moiling street again.

Eyes worked at winking away floating specks of dust.

“It's getting on,” Sam said, “and my one-eyed Kate waits. Let's head in and see what she's got for us at her hog ranch.”

“I'm not interested in a whore the first time.”

Sam laughed Ransom down. “But you are the second time, eh?”

“Not ever.” Ransom stepped over a steaming batch of fresh horse biscuits.

“Boy, where in tarnation did you ever get such an idee, hey?”

“I wish I knew myself. Because otherwise I've got as much of a hot for a woman as you have.” Ransom let his heels hit the plank walk in a slow measured fall.

“You sound like you wanna get married bad.”

“I do.”

Sam chewed on the tips of his mustache. “Hum.”

“Nights when I lay there aching like a great big sweet toothache.”

Sam laughed. “The tooth that bites the hardest is the tooth that's out of sight, eh?”

A smile moved inside Ransom's black mustache.

“Then you ain't comin' with?”

“Oh, I'll come with all right.”

“Ah. Now I got you in my sights. You're going to be one of them eye-fornicators the Good Book tells of.”

“As a favor to you, is all.”

“Ha. Come on.”

They turned a corner and went up a side street. Except for light from occasional windows, the street was dark. The walk was a path in the dust. Heels hit muted.

Two cowboys bumped past. They were laughing about somebody having big ears. The one cowboy said, “Buzz was four years old before his ma could figure out if he was going to fly or walk.” The other cowboy said, “Why, I remember those big ears of his. In a picture of him his ma once said, “The one in the middle is Buzz.' ”

On the side street the smell of horse dung was not quite so strong. Scent of sage rode on the steady breeze. There were gunshots west of town.

Two miners standing in a shadow traded memories. The one miner said, “You never know when you're going to hit it. Why, there was Simp Dickson. 'Member him? That short-armed nut? He was just out diggin' a grave for a stiff who'd gone under, and, by God, there he found it.” The other miner said, “Yeh, and look what happened to Smokie. Tired of prospectin', he lay down in the shade of a tree to rest. When he went to get to his feet, the rock he used to brace himself on was almost solid gold.”

Pink lights winked on the next corner. There was a sound of laughter, of singing, behind the pink lights.

“Somebody's having fun,” Sam said.

“Is that it?”

“That's it, my boy, The Stinging Lizard. Yessiree.”

The building with the pink windows was a two-story affair, new, and more mansion than saloon. Curtains and blinds were drawn tight across the bay windows, though vague illumination still seeped out along the sides. The place had a big veranda, with porch swings and rockers, and the front door was huge, of oak, and like the rest of the house stained brown.

Sam pushed in, Ransom following.

They found themselves in a red parlor, ornate, restful. A half-dozen women dressed only in pink wrappers mewed a greeting.

“Welcome to The Stinging Lizard, the cowboys' rest,” an assured woman's voice said. “Well, well, if it ain't good old Sam Slaymaker. Sam!” The woman speaking sat across from the girls, on a red chaise longue, feet up on a red footstool.

“Kate! Hi, beauty. How's tricks these days?”

“Pretty well. Just come to town?”

“Yip. And this time I mean to skin that onion with you. The one you left me with last time.”

“Now, Sam, you know I can't cry. That is, if you mean to bring me to tears.”

Sam roared a short laugh. “You see, boy? What'd I tell you?
Nobody, but nobody, plays fork with her. Her tines are too sharp.”

Ransom saw that Sam was right about Kate. Here was no alcoholic old harlot, but a handsome good-looking woman with hair the color of gold puccoons and the waist of a young girl. Ransom decided she wasn't much older than himself. The neat black patch over her left eye became her. It was stitched all around with gold thread and was held in place by a narrow black ribbon slipped around her head. It worked for her like a single big plum in an apple pie—it gave her appearance a tang.

Kate swung her feet off the footstool and stood up. Her purple velvet dress touched the floor, making her seem tall. A gold-plated watch with a long mesh chain hung glistening high on the left side of her bosom. Her single brown eye examined Ransom critically point for point. “And who's this handsome is as handsome does, Sam?”

“ 'Member me telling you about him the last time I was here? The little shaver I picked up wandering lost in the tall grass west of Omaha? Well, that's him, growed up.”

“He's no boy.”

“Of course he ain't.”

“He's a grown man.”

“A wildcat, in fact.”

Kate ranged herself alongside Ransom. She admired Ransom's slim height. “Just how old are you, mister?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Kate threw Sam a look. “Don't he really know how old he is?”

“Ask him.”

“Well?” Kate gave Ransom an arching smile.

Ransom roughed the end of his nose with a forefinger. “Well, I always say I feel I'm about twenty-five, and that's good enough for me.”

“Lived out west all your life?”

“Not yet.”

Kate laughed. “Ha.” She placed a light hand on his arm. “What's your handle these days?”

Her touch made Ransom jump inside. Also, something about the aroma of her, her personal perfume, caught him in the chest. He managed a playful smile. “Well, now, ma'am, that'd be telling.”

“I'll just call you Mr. Handsome.”

“Sam generally calls me boy.”

Sam didn't like it that Kate had put a hand on Ransom's arm. “The kid told me his name was Earl Ransom. When I saved him from the wolves.”

Kate's brown eye turned warm. “Well, I wasn't too far off, was I? Handsome is as Ransom does.”

Ransom smiled some more. “Handsome, no. Ransom, yes.”

Sam ratched out his throat with a big growl. “Kate, you know what this fool greenhorn told me?”

“No.”

“That he didn't want one of your sweet pigeons the first time.”

Kate's brown eye thinned. “I don't catch.”

“He said he'd rather get married first.”

The sweet pigeons behind Kate emitted little mews of protest. They came up and began to flutter around Ransom. They too admired his easy slim frame. They shimmied inside their pink wrappers so that it seemed they had purplish wings.

Kate said, “I take it then he's never visited a cowpoke house before.”

“No, he hain't.”

A new light, risen, appeared in Kate's eye.

“Can you imagine it?” Sam cried, scornful.

Kate said, thoughtful, “Good for him.”

“What?”

“I'm not always out to work a man, Sam.”

“Well I'll be blowed by a nosefly.”

Scent of her worked into Ransom. It was like a ghost hand cocking a gun in him.