Ghost Town: A Novel Read Free Page A

shadows, hitch their animals to the rail there, and, the tread of their boots on the wooden sidewalk unheard as if they trod on goose feathers, disappear through the swinging doors. Though he knows full well that no good can come of it, he follows them on in.
    In the saloon, men are clapping shoulders, shooting craps, drinking, laughing, brawling. Heard through the foggy racket: the soft slap of dealt cards, the poytt! thupp! of missed spittoons, the rickety-click of roulette and fortune wheels. Hit me, says a mustachioed fat man in a straw boater and raps his tabled cards with a balled-up fist. Beer is drawn. An ear is torn off. A bony bald man in a white shirt, yellow suspenders, and black string tie bangs out a melody on the grand piano, against which a buxom rouged-up lady with wild orange curls leans, singing a song about a good girl who went bad. She is dressed, like someone else he’s seen today, all in black, except for the crimson ruffles on her blouse, a ruby pin worn in her pierced cheek like a beauty mark, and a brass key, shiny as gold, dangling between her powdered breasts on a black ribbon. The fat man in the boater takes a punch and careens backwards toward the piano player, who keeps his left hand going while raising his right elbow to deliver a hammer blow that sends the fat man caroming headfirst into the wall and nearly through it. THIS IS A SQUARE HOUSE says a sign over his head. The other cardplayers pick the fat man’s pockets and divvy up his winnings.
    I’m gonna kill thet fuckin humpback, someone breathes in his ear.
    Who—?
    Yer throw, podnuh.
    There’s a shot, and somewhere a horse whinnies as though in sudden terror.
    Shitfire, parson! And I mean thet sincerely!
    Shet yer gob’n git yer money down, yu ole dildock!
    Awright, smack yu double, jughaid. So dole away!
    Yu gonna roll them damn bones, son, or eat em? he’s asked. A small circle of angry men glare up at him over their wild face hair, their pocked noses aglow under the kerosene lamp.
    All he wants is a beer, anything wet, but the leather cup his hand has closed around holds only a pair of ivory dice. Across the barroom, the singer is dolefully lamenting the unlucky gambler who bet and lost, one by one, all his body parts. He rattles the cup of dice. She’s hurtin tonight, he hears someone say behind him. Probly makes her peculiar hot, muses another. Yu reckon?
    Whoa boy, a squint-eyed stringy-haired oldtimer in a gambler’s knee-length black broadcloth coat cautions: Whut’s yer stake here? Having none other, he tosses his hat down, gives the cup another shake, throws a natural, and wins all their hats. There’s some grumbling. The oldtimer, scowling suspiciously, spins the dice on their corners while fingering an ebony-handled derringer tucked in his vest pocket.
    He hooks his thumb in his belt, within reach of his own pistol. Just in case. Any a them hats wuth a beer? he asks, and they all snort at that and throw them at him in disgust.
    A row is brewing meanwhile over behind the piano by the slowly spinning wheel of fortune. It’s the man with the ear ripped off. I’m tired a yu blowin off at the mouth so, he barks, blood cascading down the side of his head like a waterfall down a cliff face, and the baggy-eyed halfbreed he’s addressing sends a thick smear toward a spittoon and says: They’s a lotta truth in thet. Thet’s yer lookout, mister, says the man with the ear gone, and pulls a sawed-off pistol out of his pants and shoves it up the halfbreed’s broad brown nose. Before he can pull the trigger, though, the bald piano player, in the long perilous beat between chorus and verse (the lady is into a love song now about some legendary hero who was suddenly expired by an itinerant gunman and was “gone off to his reward, bless his big pointy boots”), rises up and head-butts him. The one-eared man’s head splits with a pop as a clay bowl might and his brains ooze out like spilled oatmeal when he hits the floor, by