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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Tommy Typhoon - Part One
The Dicken’s Proposition
Andrew Stuchlik
It’s hot tonight, most like every other night here. The sweat on my head- just under the brim of my hat- is jus’ a gentle reminder that I’m home. There really ain’t more to expect from a place where rocks and cactuses outnumber the people living here by the hundreds. The kinda place where the sand is never far, and the idea of green is jus’ a memory of another time and another place, that surely ain’t here. ‘Spose it would be kinda depressin’ to someone who ain’t been here for too long. But, I’ve become pretty fond of this place- and to me- it’s kinda comfortin’ knowin’ by heart every buildin’ and every soul who’s ended up here for one reason or another.
I walk into the bar and see the same faces I do most every other night, ‘cept this one that is. It‘s been a while since we had a guest in this sleepy little town, but I don‘t think much of it at the time. He’s tall, prolly six foot two give or take an inch or two depending on which stool he’s sittin’ at. The man’s wearing a battered, dust covered, and sun bleached overcoat sitting on his shoulders, and for now, he seems pretty content at the end of the bar waging a silent war with the alcohol in his glass. Well, whatever was in that glass didn’t seem to be faring very well against the rock hard stomach of the man who was treating it like a child’s juice.
I look him over out of the corner of my eye, and I notice that the shadows cloak his face in an eerie way, even in the dim lighting of the ol‘ tavern. I wonder to myself- before sitting- if there is anywhere that I have seen him before. The thought only lasts for a second, and I don’t think too hard ‘bout it ‘cause I suppose it doesn’t really matter so much to me anymore. There are no more blood oaths or promises of revenge that bear my name anymore.
I go and sit at my usual place right near the middle of the bar and order up a double shot of whiskey no ice. Never bothered with ice, not that there was much around these parts anyways, but it did always seem to get in the way anyhow.
I drink it back, and light up a cigarette that I pulled from a pack out of my jacket pocket. I lean back in my barstool, and stretch out a little as I take a long drag off my cigarette. I exhale, as I let out a tired sigh in rings of smoke that make their way up to the ceiling, and I order myself another drink. I hunch over the glass and I think the same thoughts that I do jus’ about every other night for as long as I can remember with any clarity. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch the stranger stealing looks at me from his spot at the bar, but I don’t think much of it at the time.
This ol’ mug of mine was pretty famous at one time so I brush it off like it ain’t nothin‘, an’ just keep my thoughts in the past like usual for this time of day. It ain’t like I wasn’t used to people staring- a habit I picked up over the years. I turn my head and look at the man who is now just directly looking at me, studying‘ my face jus‘ to make sure it was me. The man, whose face was still- though I was looking right at him- hidden in the shade of the night from the brim of his hat, and I still can’t make out a single facial feature. It was like the darkness itself covered it for him, like an intentional act of courtesy from the shade that stood solitary watch in the parts of the dimming lights that surrounded the bar. His shadowed head turns to the bartender, and raises his empty glass to him. Jim walks over to him with a bottle in hand and pours the man another, then a double.
I sink back down to my glass, and drink it down in a single gulp. I take another drag from my smoke and motion for another. Jim picks up a bottle and pours me the same over, but this time, when I go to pay for it, the man across the bar nods his head to Jim. Jim walks over and he pay for my drink, then looks down at his glass and say’s:
“This one is on me.” He tells me
“It’s my pleasure,” he starts. “‘specially since I’m drinking with a legend sitting across the bar from me.” He says to me.
“Really you do too much, I can take care of my own.” I respond.
“Then just think of it as a courtesy to a man who knows talent when he see’s it.” He tells me as he shrugs back down to his drink.
“You flatter me, where it isn’t due.” I tell him.
“But, I’ll accept it out of the generosity that it was given with.” I raise my glass up to the stranger and we say a silent toast and drink it down.
“You from around here?” I ask him, just trying to be polite by starting some chatter, knowin’ already good and well that he wasn’t.
“I’m not really from anywhere.” He replies.
“I guess I don’t spend enough time in one place long enough to call it home.”
“Not for a long time.” He finishes, and I nod my head understanding what he means instantly. I’ve lived in this town now for about ten years, but before that, I never really spent too long in any certain place either. Goes with the trade, I suppose.
“You’re Typhoon Tommy, aren’t you?” He asks me, keeping his head down, glaring at his glass as he speaks. I laugh to myself, but it comes out a bit louder than I’d hoped.
“Haven‘t heard anyone talk about him in a while.” I say tell him.
“Heard he’d died a while back.” I say to him. The man kinda chuckles, obviously having heard rumors of his death too.
“Tommy the Typhoon is said to be as fast as a scorpion, and twice as deadly.” He responds in a kinda mundane voice, clearly reciting slogans from a time that seems so long ago now. He raises his head and looks at me when he says it though, at least, I think he was lookin’ at me. I still couldn’t see the fella’s face, there was a special peculiar darkness where his face should have emerged.
“You know, some people say that you’re not a man at all, that your really just a demon wearing the suit of a man.” He says to me.
“People talk a lot.” I tell him, not really giving much thought to what he had said. After all, it wasn’t the first time I had heard it- fact of the matter is- that it wasn’t the hundredth time I’d heard it either.
“But you should know.” I said to him.
“Typhoon Tommy died awhile back.”
“I am just an old man sitting at a saloon who likes to drink his whiskey dry.”
“You’ll have to forgive me.” He says to me, obviously hearing the callousness in my response.
“I didn’t mean to come off the way that I did.”
“But you really must understand, considering how much you look like him.” He says with a hint of remorse in his voice.
“Think nothing of it.” I say to him. I down another drink and light up another cigarette. The man gets up from his stool, and comes over and sits next to me. I look around the bar, and see that most everyone else had left, and that we were the only two left here- aside from Jim- that is.
“So what do you do?” I ask him.
“I provide a special kind of service.” He says to me.
“Is that so?” I respond. He just nods his head, and takes a sip off the glass of who knows what’s sitting in front of him.
“I suppose that I am just as eager to talk about what I do as you are about your gunslinging days.” He says. The man looks up to Jim, who is cleaning a glass at the moment and motions for two more drinks. Jim brings it over, and fills our glasses, and I just nod my head in thanks to him. Jim fills our glasses and leaves the bottle on the table, realizing that we were probably the last two customers of the night, and he knew that I could cover any tab we could acquire.
“You’ve got a sort of obvious gloom about you.” I say to him.
“I expect the same could be said about you.” He says to me.
“’Spose so.” I say. He kinda chuckles when I say it, and for the first time all night, his head raises high enough for me to see his face. His face and eyes were completely misleading from how he seemed to be. He had a very sad and reluctant demeanor, which you could never tell from his face. He had a sort of eerie light blue eyes and an almost surreal angelic face. Other than a few days scruff, he looked like a painting of an unrealistic artist’s vision of what a saint should look like. If any painter could capture his face and do it any justice, he would be renowned the world over, of that there was no doubt.
“I’m almost certain that I have seen you before.” I say to him, half-racking my brain again to try and remember him.
“I think I just have one of those faces.” He lies to me
“Have we met before?” I ask him.
“Indirectly, we have, yes.” He says.
“But never formally.”
“What’s your name?” I ask him.
“Like you.” He says.
“People have come up with so many different names for me, that I suppose it’s almost pointless to name a few.” With that I know- without question- who he is.
“Why are you here?” I ask him.
“To have a drink, why else?” He counters.
“You know what I mean.” I say, my voice dropping a few notes. He catches on instantly to my weariness and his demeanor shows the same things my voice had, a terrible-bleak realization.
“I’m just headed from this place and that.” He responds.
“This just happened to be on the way to that.”
“Jus’ so you know.” I start.
“I have no ambitions of greed, and no lust to want for.” I say as I finish my drink and start to get up.
“Good.” He says, while I was in mid-stand.
“if that’s true, you have nothing to fear from me or any other man.” He says and a very special kind of calmness, security moves through me and I cautiously sit back down.
“Most men in your position would wish or bargain for unrealistic or selfish things, that could bring them only momentary bits of fleeting happiness.”
“But they are too near-sighted to see what it is that their heart really aches for.” He tells me.
“I think you give me too much credit.” I say.
“Don’t think that there aren’t selfish things I could wish for.”
“Like to have your dead wife and son back?” He asks me. I sigh hard as I finish my drink faster than I had planned, but keep my eyes straight forward. I’ve never been afraid to look a man in the face in all my life, but this ain’t jus’ no ordinary man. I’ve also never been afraid of another man in all my life, and in this instance he wasn’t any different than any of the rest of them. Although he was of a much different sort than the rest, I treated him the same, mostly. I keep my head looking straight ahead, never making eye contact directly. Mostly ’cause I know who he is, and I’m afraid that if my eyes meet his, that I might just give in to this terrible hurtin’ I’ve got in my heart in every moment that passes by in a world that I now find so empty.
“Yeah, like that.” I say with a scowl.
“I don’t want you to think that I’m trying to upset you.” He says to me.
“Just wanna be sure that we’re on the same page here.”
“We are.” I tell him.
“That’s not to say that I haven’t missed them terribly everyday since they have been gone.” I respond.
“I know.” He says.
“But I wouldn’t have blamed you, if you had been a weaker man, just so you know.”
“Well, don’t let me fool you.” I say.
“Especially since that’s your game, isn’t it?” I say harshly.
An annoyance creeps into his voice as he answers me: “Don’t mistake the foolishness of others for a maliciousness in me.”
“I give them all a chance to walk away or edit the wishes in their selfish hearts, but not all men are like you.”
“Some are driven by something that is far darker and that darkness is just a reflection of themselves, and not of me.”
“I just provide the shortcut from A to C, should someone want it badly enough.” “And for that I’m an outcast, for that I will never know the bliss that I had before.”
“I’m not going to lie, I was viciously regretful for being cast from my home, but all that anger is now replaced with a terrible sadness that I fear will never pass.”
“Those were their choices and their desires. It’s most certainly not by something that I have fooled them into wanting, just a manifestation of their near-sighted ignorance.”
I think about what he had just said for a minute, and then once again I get up and start to leave. But, I don’t do it hastily and I don’t do it out of a scorn or a misunderstanding of what he had said. I do it because I didn’t need another drink and because of the fact that I did understand what he was sayin‘ in ways that you can only imagine.
“You never did tell me.” He says to me as I get near the entrance of the bar.
“What’s that?” I stop and ask him on my way to the door.
“What’s your wish?’ He asks. I think about it for just a split second before I answer him.
“My only wish is that my wife and my boy will find heaven.” I say.
“Even if I can never see it myself.”
“I don’t have anything to do with that.” He says sadly. I start walking out the door, and it’s on my way through the door, that I hear him say softly:
“But that’s not something you should’ve ever been worried about.”
“You’ll see them yourself soon enough.”
I continue walking out the door and I get about ten yards down the gravel road before I stop in my footsteps with the light silenced fall of footsteps behind me. I turn around and see him standing across from me in the street. He’s fast, and quiet too. I didn’t even hear him walk out of the bar, just the parting of the rocks in the gravel roads that surrounded me.
I suppose, from the start of this evening, I knew we would meet like this. Most outsiders we get around here are men who have heard rumors of a man who has never lost a fight, a man who is unparalleled in the sport and can never be beaten. Most of it is complete bologna, jus’ rumors that have gotten around all these years. But, that doesn’t stop them from comin’ and testin’ themselves. How many men have been injured in my fights, how many more ambitions, dreams have I taken? More of these than I can count that’s for sure, far more. How many more would there be?
Was I justified, or did I just want to feel so? I suppose they’ll jus’ keep comin’ till the day I die. But, I ain’t got it in me to quit, never did. Guess that’s what got me in trouble in the first place. I’m jus’ too stubborn for my own damn good I ‘spose.
We both square off to each other, making small changes in our stance to compensate for the other‘s. I could tell he had done this before, prolly a lot more than me. He didn’t respond to the moves that I made, but it was kinda like he was anticipatin’ ‘em.
“You seem like you know your way around this game.” I say to him.
“I’ve done this a few times.” He says with a smile.
“You think you can beat me?” I ask ‘em.
“Don’t know for sure till it’s over I spose.” He responds.
There is a sorta calm tension between the two of us. It is obvious that there is no real anger or ill will towards the other, just the hankerin’ to see whose better. ‘Spose there was a part of me who wanted to know jus’ as bad as he did. But at the same time, it was mutually agreed that neither one of us was an amateur. We each had a certain respect for one another.
“So, Tommy the Typhoon, shall we do this?”
“Well I guess that there is no more point in delay’n what’s gonna happen, ‘spose its gonna happen and puttin it off ain’t gonna change nothing‘.” I say.
“I want you to know, though.” I start.
“I do know who you are, Dickens.” He kinda laughs when I say a version of his name out loud.
“Well that certainly is an interesting name, I spose.” He says to me, still kinda laughing.
“Who comes up with these names?” He asks me.
“Not really sure.” I say.
“Better than Mephistopheles though, right?”
“Suppose a name like that kinda show’s my age though.” He says.
“You really must be something’ though, to know who I am and still come out and meet me head on.” He tells me.
“Gotta respect a man like that.” He says,
“Like I said before, you give me too much credit.” I say to him.
“Me, I am just a stubborn ol’ man, who drinks too much whiskey.”
He raises his head so I can see his face, and I can see that he’s smiling, his sad sort of smile. We nod to each other and we both stare one another down. Our hands each resting on our gun’s, just waiting for the other to make his move.
Then it happens faster than a flash of lightning, we both draw at exactly the same time and it ends faster than most people would know that it ever happened at all. Two shot’s fire so close to the exact same time, that all you can hear is one clear shot. We both know that we each had gotten a shot off, the only question now, is just how it hit and where.
We both stand tall in front of one another, both of us knowing who had won, and who had lost. The man standing in front of me falls first, and while we both feel the pain at the exact same time, only he falls to his knees.
I hadn’t shot him anywhere that woulda killed him, but I bet his gut feels like someone had just cut him open with a dull rusted blade of a bent knife. My shoulder hurt, but I’ve had worse before. I know that the only reason that I was still standing was because mine had hit first. Then again, I knew I was gonna win this before it had even began. Spose I really won it right before I walked out the door.
“You okay?” I ask him.
“Had worse.” He says to me.
“Guess this makes you the better fighter.” He says to me.
“And I guess that the rumors about Typhoon Tommy are true too.”
“Fought over a hundred men, and not a single life taken by his hand.”
“That not a single bullet from his gun ever found it’s way other than exactly where he wanted it to go.”
“Don’t let my past fool you, I’ve killed a lot of men.” I say to him solemnly.
“But you should know, there wasn’t any of them that didn’t deserve exactly what they got.” He says.
“Specially those who had a hand in your wife and kid.” There was a genuine kinda solace in his voice, when the last few words come outta his mouth. I sigh, but nothin’ he was gonna say was gonna make me feel better about it.
“Like I said before.” I tell him.
“Typhoon Tommy died a long time ago.” He stands up slowly, but when he gets to his feet, he stands straight up like nothing had ever happened.
“You should know, though.” I tell him:
“I’m not that man anymore, nowadays, I’m just an old man who likes his whiskey warm.” I say.
“And I am just a fella passin’ through.” He says back with a chuckle. With that, I blink a single time, and he’s gone, vanished into the air and nothingness beyond. I’ve never really been sure what happened to him, but I like to think that he’s trying and testing his limits for another encounter, one that I look eagerly for.
He’s no demon, I think to myself, just a special sort of devoted, and for that I respect him more than any fear I could feel from any east or devil. He tries to ease our pain, it’s just so unfortunate that everyone rarely knows what they need. Gun fighting is easy, you look your opponent square in the eye and the best man wins. Real life is so much harder.
Gun-fighting is the only life I’ve known for so long, the excitement and fortitude it requires to stand in a straight shot to death and still be standing after the gunpowder bursts, takes a special sort of breed of man to endure. The real skill is aiming true to keep from killin’ the man in front of you, but just hurtin’ him enough before the second round comes off. It’s definitely not a job for the faint of heart. Any shot can go astray , and every unaccounted for shot could be the one within inches of your life every time, but a real gunfighter pushes themselves to the edge, if for no other reason than just to see the view. I hope to see you again, and maybe this time you’ll stand a saints chance in hell, but to be honest to myself, I know that day will never come. The only thing I can do is hope. I haven’t ever given up a thing in my life, and I do not intend to start now, I suppose I was always too damn stubborn for my own good.
The only difference between now and later, is that I know your face, it must be hard to hide a face like that. I won’t ever forget it, that you can be sure of, it’s a face that tells me there is no need to hold back, and to go with my all just so I won’t die, or take a sort of pain I don’t want to take, just to live to see another day. Until we meet again Mr. Dickens.
Part Two- The Death of Typhoon Tommy>>
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