The Cassidy Posse (6 page)

“It was nothin’,” shrugged Billy. “The Sheriff was just tellin’ me how he liked what I was doing for the town.”

“Tryin’ tah put it on the bloody map, I’d say.”

“Forget that meddlin’ old fart,” said Billy. “Do you have a game for me?”

“That I do, Kid,” replied Harry enthusiastically. “Couple of cowpokes right off the trail.”

“They got money?” Billy asked emphatically. “They aren’t more saddle tramps, are they?” He walked to the end of the bar and peered around the corner at the two cowboys sitting in the back of the cantina.

“Blimey, put your hat on,” scolded English Harry. He placed the flat-brimmed black hat with the wide satin band on Billy’s head as carefully as if he were coronating a king. “Now remember all I taught you.”

“Don’t worry, little man,” Billy said, irritated at any question of his competence.

“You have to pluck that card out of the band as smooth as silk,” he cautioned.

Billy brushed away his instructive hand and walked towards the two cowboys with the small Englishman dogging his heels.

“Howdy,” said the older, more congenial, of the two cowboys as Billy approached. His dour young companion said nothing.

Billy stood before them in his new, ill-fitting suit and smiled with casual distain. English Harry adroitly slid in between them. “This here is Billy Fayre, chaps,” he said cheerfully. “He weren’t doing nothin, so I asked him why don’t he set in with me friends Jim and Frank for a hand or two of cards. What could be friendlier than that, says I?” Harry pulled out the chair for Billy and then quickly took his own seat. He snatched up the cards and shuffled them with practiced dexterity. “Now what say we cut for the deal.”

Jim sullenly stared at the lively Englishman a long, uncomfortable moment before finally cutting the deck and getting the game underway. He and his amicable friend won the first few small pots but their luck began to change as more money was introduced into the game. Jim began to drink a little too much to play effectively and his mood became ugly. Frank, always the peacemaker, was doing his best to quiet his young friend’s grumbling. When Billy got the deal, he called for straight poker with jokers wild. The hand he dealt to Jim apparently pleased him. He quit grumbling and raised the bet twenty dollars.

“Too rich for my blood,” said Frank, throwing in his hand.

English Harry fingered his chips as if he were really contemplating the wager. “Count me out, mates,” he finally conceded.

Billy bore the semblance of a worried look. He reached up and scratched his head, tipping his hat back in a contemplative pose. He looked at his hand again and said with a long sigh “I’ll see your twenty and raise you twenty.”

The young cowboy sat bolt upright in the chair with this development. He would be putting over a month’s pay on the table. A month of herding cattle, his skin being burnt by the sun and the persistent west Texas wind. A month of eating cold beans and dry dust washed down with bad coffee. He looked at his hand again and regained his confidence in what he saw there. Frank leaned over to put a word of caution in his ear but the irritable young man pushed him away.

“I’ll see your twenty,” he said tersely pushing his last precious dollars forward.

Billy smiled contemptuously as he laid down three Jacks and a joker to make four of a kind. Jim stared blankly at the cards that lay mocking him on the table.

“That was all the money you got for your saddle,” said Frank.

Jim laid down his hand: a full house - two fives and two kings plus one joker. He looked at Billy with contempt and it was returned in kind by the unblinking Kid Del Rio.

“Two wild cards in the game and you both end up with one,” said Frank, amazed by the coincidence.

English Harry smiled nervously knowing one of the five cards he had laid face down on the table was also a joker.

“You never had that hat on before you sat down to play cards,” Jim challenged, raising the stakes of the game beyond money. “You weren’t wearin’ it when you was standin’ at the bar.” The table quieted instantly and the quiet spread in a concentric circle from the table until it enveloped the entire cantina.

“I like to wear it when I play cards,” Billy replied matter-of-factly, his hands inching towards the edge of the table. “I used to wear a worn-out Stetson when I was a busted saddle bum like you. I don’t want to get that way again.”

A look of fear crossed Jim’s face for an instant; the stakes of this game had gone too high and it was too late to fold. Billy rose from his chair and drew all in the same motion. The moment had come so quickly, Jim did not move until he saw the nickel-plated Colt clear Billy’s holster. He had barely touched the chipped wooden handle of his old revolver when Billy’s first .45 slug knocked him backwards. It was followed by a second and a third as Billy efficiently cocked and fired the short-barreled Peacemaker. Jim sprawled on the floor, his dead eyes staring at the ceiling, his feet still tangled in the chair. A crimson wave of blood spread from the center of his chest where the three slugs had entered in a close pattern.

“Damn, you didn’t have to kill him!” Frank screamed.

Billy looked away from the fallen man and towards the source of criticism of his judgment. He cocked his smoking gun and, moving the barrel a few inches to the right, fired again. The back of Frank’s head splattered on English Harry and he looked at the blood and bits of bone and brain soiling his coat sleeve with curious, speechless horror.

Billy Fayre, alias Kid Del Rio, holstered his gun and moved quickly towards the door. When he reached the sunlight, he turned to see the eerie smoke he had created masking the stunned faces. He mounted someone’s horse and was gone. He dug his spurless heels into the side of the animal until he reached a shack several miles from town.

“You are in trouble,” Rosita insisted. “That is why you must leave so quickly. You never say a word to me about leaving and now you must go right now.”

“Si,” said Billy, “muy pronto.” He took a silk shirt with a ruffled front out of the dresser and considered it a moment. “Here, give this to your next hombre. I don’t think I will be needing it where I’m going.”

“And where are you going in such a big hurry?”

“English Harry told me about some big shot up in Paris looking for regulators to go to Wyoming. There’s some saddle tramps up North that have took to rustling cattle off the big outfits. They got to be taught right from wrong.”

“Regulator - that’s a fancy name for a hired gun. You’re just a paid killer!”

Billy turned towards her with his hand raised but Rosita quickly rolled across the bed, putting an obstacle between them.

“Damn it, I won’t take no shit off a whore. It’s just not gonna happen.”

“I told you I am not a whore no more!” she screamed. “I do laundry. I do laundry just like my mother did. I am not a whore.”

“Hey, okay, settle down,” Billy said mockingly. “I keep forgetting you changed occupations.”

“Why you got to always say and do things to hurt me,” her eyes narrowing on Billy. “I know you since we are kids but I can’t remember when you got so mean.”

“Well, it just must have happened real gradual like.” He reached into a narrow closet and pulled out a Winchester. “Where’s my duster at? I know I put it in here.”

Rosita sighed and walked into the backroom of her unpainted two-room shanty. She returned in a moment with the full-length leather coat dragging on the floor. “I packed it away. I think you don’t need it till next winter.”

“Well, spring in Wyoming is like winter around here.”

“How you know? You never go any farther from this God forsaken place than me.”

“Well, I guess I know a few things more about the world than a Mexican whore.”

“Now I am a Mexican whore,” she said challengingly. “If I were a gringo whore, I would know a little more. I would know what the weather was in Cheyenne and Denver and maybe New York City.”

“Maybe so,” said Billy, looking at her with a malicious grin.

“Why you always try to act like you are better than me? Now you turn your nose up at Mexicans and you are part Mexican.”

He reached out suddenly and grabbed her by the throat and raised her up precariously on her tiptoes. “Where’d you hear shit like that?”

She looked at him sullenly and without fear. “Old Juan Hildago told me. He said your grandmother married his brother the day Texas became a state. That was back in 1845. He said she was a fine lady.”

“You don’t have to tell me about my grandma being a fine lady. She raised me til I was twelve. She’d have lived a lot longer if she didn’t burn herself out worrying about my useless mother. There weren’t no use worrying about trash like her. If she wasn’t making someone’s life a misery, she just didn’t feel right. She’d have went to bed with a damn coyote if it had two bucks.”

“Maybe that is why you are so crazy, Billy Fayre. You are part coyote. I guess you’d think that is better than being part Mexican.”

Billy’s anger suddenly subsided and he looked very solemn. “No, Rosita, I surely don’t think that. At least you know who you are and who your people are. My mother said she married a guy named Fayre. Probably another one of her stories. I wouldn’t know my ole man if I bumped into the sonavabitch on the street. For all I know, he could have been a damn coyote.”

He folded the duster over his arm and picked up the Winchester. Next to it was his trail-worn cowboy hat with the red lone star on the side. He discarded the black gambler’s hat with the satin band and placed the familiar old Stetson on his head.

“Guess I wasn’t cut out to be no fancy gambling man,” he mumbled as he walked out the door.

Mike McGhan strolled casually down the wood sidewalk into Bridgeport, the section of Chicago the old timers called “the patch.” It was the sixth ward, the only place on earth Mike knew of where the Irish were the masters. Their domain was row upon row of dismal one-room shanties and tenement houses. Each had a carefully-cultivated vegetable garden and usually a goat tethered in the back yard for milk and garbage disposal. As depressing as it looked, it always comforted Mike with its familiarity. Everywhere he looked there was a memory. He glanced across the street and he pictured his younger self and little Johnny O’Shay hanging around the men talking on the corner, waiting for one to throw away a cigarette butt from which two boys could steal a few more desperate puffs.

He pushed the gate at his mother’s place and it moved only far enough that he be permitted to enter. It was one of the many things he should fix but never seemed to find the time. When his father was alive, he never had to concern himself with such mundane tasks. The old man was overjoyed when something broke so he had the opportunity to roll up his sleeves and attack the problem. He would grumble and cuss and beg the saints for patience but would enjoy every minute of it. He noticed that his mother had already been out in the garden preparing the soil for another planting. Mike stood on the porch a moment considering the freshly turned earth, relieved that spring was here.

“Hey, where’s me darlin’ mother,” he shouted as he came through the door without knocking.

“Your darlin’ mother tis over here darnin’ her ungrateful son’s socks, if yuh must be knowin’,” came a reply from the parlor. “Even a lowly sot from County Mayo would be showin’ more respect.”

Mike swept off his hat with a dramatic flurry and knelt in front of the gray-haired woman hunched over in a chair. He picked up each hand and kissed it elaborately.

“Right you are mother dear and bless these precious hands that keep the cold ov uh Chicago winter from nippin’ young Michael McGhan’s wee little toes.”

“Young, indeed,” she said scornfully pulling her hand away from him. “I got uh son thirty-two yars ov age without the least prospects ov marriage. Thet is uh grim thought fer a poor widow woman whose husband has already passed fer his reward. There will be no grandchildren tuh carry forth the McGhan name.”

“Grandchildren!” Mike drew back, feinting surprise. “I have two sisters producing litters of grandchildren. Why, on Sunday I can scarce move through this house for all the nieces and nephews under foot. Sure but ye’re blessed with grandchildren.”

“Dun’t be dancin’ aroond the issue, Michael. You know watt I mean. There will be no one tah carry on the proud name ov yer blessed father, may his soul rest in peace.”

“Now, mother, you know yer only son is much like yer dearly departed husband. The apple never falls far from duh tree. The more yuh pester a hard-headed Irishman about somthin’, the less likely he is tuh ever do it.”

“Harriet Flanagan broke up with Jack Daley last week,” she continued without missing a beat. “I always felt it wuz a crime fer thet fine girl to be weddin’ the likes uh him. When thet man drinks, there’s uh dee-vil in him. The Irish curse is on him sure.”

“I dun’t mean tuh be critical ov yer judgment Mrs. McGhan but have yuh noticed that dear Harriet has been fillin’ out some ov late.”

“She ah fine full figure ov uh woman, Michael McGhan,” his mother retorted defensively. “A healthy lass able tuh bear uh dozen children and do uh good day’s wark in the bargain.”