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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Pretty Dance
Michael Fontana
Small street in Laredo. I knew the drill. Heel-toe, heel-toe. Spurs with insect flutter in tortuous breeze. Still, the Sailor hadn’t spilled out of the canteen doorway. His name a joke because he had never even seen a splash of ocean water. Half Cherokee and half Spanish. Gold tooth in front. Turquoise eyes. Hay in his black hair from a passing wagon. Menace of silver guns clinging to either hip.
I was hired by a banker in Tulsa to track the Sailor down. The banker a serious man, round, red-faced, monocle, gold suit to match what touched his hands all day. He spoke in surprisingly steady tones. “Sailor had the teller, this sweet little lassie, down on all fours. Rifle barrel to her head. Threatened to fire if people didn’t neatly sweep their gold coins into a canvas bag he’d brought just for the purpose. Then he killed the lassie just for entertainment before hefting out the building and climbing on a horse.”
Same horse that was tied to a post in front of me. Silver, with beads tied into its pale mane. It snorted and stamped like it knew my purposes. I slapped a hand on my revolver and gave the cylinder a spin like roulette. This whole venture was a gamble, tracking down killers into unfamiliar places.
The canteen smelled of horse manure and sweetcorn. Stale beer smell pushed around by ceiling fans. Didn’t take me but a second to see the Sailor at his booth in the back, a long knife open, carving something into the polished wood of the table.
“You oughtn’t do that,” I said as I took the seat across from him. “Private property and all.”
“Don’t give a rat about private property,” he said. He kept carving. Upside down I saw it was becoming a picture of a girl. The kind of outline men wore on their arms as tattoos.
I lifted my piece and aimed it at him. The carving continued. The sound grew the longer he went at it. Like a child out of breath.
He pushed the barrel aside. For the first time he looked up at me. “You a bounty hunter?”
“Am.”
“Ain’t no bounty on me. I’m already dead.” He chuckled as he said it.
I restored the barrel to its fix on him. “Good. Saves me the trouble of shooting you.”
He put the knife down. Pulled a pouch of tobacco out from under his shirt, tapped some of the contents into a paper. Set the whole thing afire. “I don’t worry about you. I give you a better bounty to leave me be.”
“How’s that?” My hand grew suddenly and slightly unsteady.
“You’re on me for the bank heist. I still got the money. It’s tucked nice and neat under a tree. Only problem is you got to figure out which tree. So I lead you to the tree, you take your share, then you hie away.”
“How much?”
He said it. It was twice what the banker offered for his capture.
“How about you show me where the money is, then I shoot you. Take it all, plus take the banker’s money.”
“Banker’s going to want his money back’s the only problem.”
“So I leave your corpse to rot beneath the tree, take your stolen money and leave. The banker can go spin.”
“Then someone like you will hunt you down for killing me. Plus they know you got the stolen gold. Hang you sweet as sunshine soon as they can get.”
Sailor laid out on his side of the booth. Snakeskin boots over the edge. Smoking with little circles from his mouth. Smile with that gold tooth inside like a lamprey in the lake.
I lowered the gun. My hand was shaking anyway. Not the right signal for a thief to see. “All right. Show me the tree.”
He all of a sudden picked up the knife by the handle and lifted it up. I wasn’t going to be fast enough on my gun to stop him. But he just jammed the point into the table, right in the heart of the girl he’d carved. “Let’s go.”
We walked awhile. Wind kicked up and tossed sand around us like to blind our eyes. Somewhere nearby the braying of a goat. Outside the city, I kept my hand on my piece.
Wouldn’t catch me off-guard twice like that. I go down with a bullet or a knife, he goes down with a bullet of his own.
But he didn’t make for his pistol. Instead he led me to the foot of a tree. From it hung pears. He yanked one down and bit into it. Juice ran down his chin. “I’d rather drink this than drink your whiskey.”
“Let’s get to the gold and get out of here.” I tried to sound as firm as I could.
“You’re awfully impatient,” he said. “That’s not a good quality in a man with a gun. Cause you to open up too soon, miss your shot, take the hit yourself.”
We sat at the foot of the tree and listened as pears fell heavy as stones. So hard they left an invex in the ground. I picked one up and ate too. Soon all you could hear was the both of us crunching like coyotes on a bone.
Somewhere along the way I drew sick. I threw up in the dust. Sailor might have taken that moment to shoot me but he didn’t. He just watched me crawl around, hands and knees, and chuckled. “This food don’t sit with you too well.”
Between gags, I tried to complete a sentence. “The gold. Where’s the gold?”
He finally stood up and brushed himself off. Hurled his pear core out into the distance. Wiped his hands on his dungarees. Then he went to work digging his heel in the dirt. It resembled a dance the way he did it.
Soon he was through the weak layers at the surface and located the top of the canvas bag. He gently led it out of the hole and onto the ground. Flies swirled around it before heading off for the fallen fruit.
I watched the flies and grew sick again. This time I laid flat on the ground. Soon I was covered in dust like a cactus. I could only smell my sickness rise from a puddle in front of me.
Sailor again might have shot me but didn’t. Instead he laughed as he lifted the bag. “This food don’t sit with you too well,” he said again.
I tried to reach out to grab onto something, whether him or the gold or the tree or even one of those wicked pears. But my arm fell limp, kicking up a new huff of dust.
Meantime Sailor lifted the bag over his head. I thought for a flash that he was going to clobber me with it, drop it on my head. Some kind of thief and drifter irony, killing me with the goods. But he didn’t. Instead he opened it closer to him. No gold emerged. Instead, only stones.
“The money, she’s gone,” he said with no inflection.
I choked out a few words. “This is a surprise?”
“No surprise at all.” The gold tooth flared again. “Never had it to begin with.”
I rolled over on my back. Sickness came in waves and fell aside. “How’s that?”
“Your banker. He lies to you. He has his gold back where he wants it. Might be counting it piece by piece right as we speak.”
“Then why would he send me?”
“Because you have a very bad reputation. No one much likes a bounty hunter. They have no loyalty. Plus they kill the banker’s brother. So he pretends to hire you to catch me when he really hires me to catch you. It’s a pretty dance.”
“But you killed that teller.”
“He lies again. There was no teller. The robbery was staged, see?” He chose this moment to finally remove his guns and train them on me. I was too weak to respond in kind. Started to say my prayers but realized I didn’t have one.
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