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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Wrangler Required for the Deadfall Saloon
by Michael McGlade
Grady squeezed through the narrow alley between two wooden buildings. Best not to attract attention. Seven o’clock in the morning. The air thick with mesquite and dense as water. You didn’t walk somewhere, you waded. The blue sky was a lazy blue, like some artist had squirted it from a tube. The day already too hot for Grady to argue. In the sagebrush, among the yuccas, through the dirt streets in the frontier town of Red Oak, stillness. Even the birds had slept late.
At the end of the alley, the Deadfall Saloon stood across the street. A huge man with a leathery face the color of burnt brick blocked Grady’s path.
“Not this again,” Grady said and squirmed and wriggled backwards.
The man yanked the kid out of the alley, shoved him against a wall, leaned close enough to touch noses.
“If you’re gonna kiss me, it’ll cost extra,” Grady said.
“Keep talkin’. Your gon’ make this worse than it’s got to be, wrangler.”
“Y’know, I ain’t never noticed this before,” Grady said, “but up close you’re much uglier.”
Grady felt the gut shot like it was a reddened firebrand. He slumped to his knees. “Alright, alright,” he said and reached in his pocket and threw a quarter dollar in the dirt.
“S’pose you all’s a slow learner after all.”
“It’s everything I got.”
A horse-drawn mail carriage trundled along the rutted dirt street and the driver watched the men and kept on watching as the carriage continued toward the outskirts of town. A slow breeze of stale air carried the remembrance of rain amid the dust and smoke and reek of manure.
“You kids act tough as leather but you all crumble like mud,” the man said and bent down and collected the quarter. “I told you I want a dollar every day.”
“Ok, I’ll get you your money.”
“I know you’ll get me my money. And you’ll keep gettin’ me my money ‘cause you’re too yeller to do anythin’ about it. Ain’t you?” He took hold of Grady’s jaw and angled the kid’s face upwards till their eyes met. “Well, ain’t you?”
Grady looked away.
The man stood. “The last feller did your job, he tried to leave town without payin’ me what he owed. Now, I know you ain’t gon’ make me come lookin’ for my money again.”
Grady shrank like a slug on salt.
“Welcome to Red Oak, wrangler.”
Truman stripped out of his clothes and folded the waistcoat, shirt and breeches to their creases and set them on the bottom of the steel locker in the communal changing room, which contained slatted benches, sinks, and walnut-grained pecan flooring. The room was Alabama hot and had a sticky-swampy feel. Traces of chloride of lime lingered. Truman got dressed in a robe and reached into the pocket of the jacket hanging in the locker, removed a billfold, unclipped a five dollar note and replaced the billfold in the jacket pocket. He closed the locker door, turned the key in the lock and dropped the key in his robe pocket.
Truman tore open a sachet of powered preparation, with the pleasant odor of juniper and horse urine, and shook it into his mouth, poured a drink of water from the sweating decanter into a glass and swallowed a mouthful. He smoothed back his thinning hair, gray as brushed steel, and exited into the hallway. Austin, the kid on the desk, nodded to Truman as he passed by and watched as Truman made his way down the hallway and stopped outside the last room on the left.
“Dawlin’,” he said, “it’s Truman and I brought room service. I sure do hope you’re hungry.” The door was unlocked from the inside and he entered the room.
Austin glanced around the empty hallway. He was sat at a desk near the top of a curving stairwell that led to the main floor and bar of the Deadfall saloon. Austin watched the door Truman had entered for a long moment. The wall clock read seven-ten. Austin entered the changing room, fetched a key from his pocket and opened Truman’s locker. He found the billfold, hesitated.
Grady climbed the stairs to the first floor of the Deadfall saloon. The taste of whiskey still soured his mouth. There was no one at the desk. The wall clock read seven-twenty. He was ten minutes early.
“Austin,” he called, “is you about?”
No answer. Whoops and hollers and an un-tuned piani from the bar downstairs. The muddy over-drunk antics of men and cards. Grady sat at the desk and waited. Movement on the stairs. A woman’s forced laughter and a man’s drunken ramble. They approached the desk. Shelly stopped but the man continued onwards. Grady barred his way.
“I done paid the woman,” he said.
“We got us a room charge, too,” Grady said.
“How much?”
“Gonna cost you two bits, sir.”
“Come on let’s go outside and do it,” he said to Shelly and took her arm.
“No, it don’t work that way,” Grady said. “You pay her and you pay me.”
“Settle down, wrangler. I got the money … somewhere.” He turned out his pockets and came up with a dime. “What can I get for a short bit?”
“You can get out.”
The man stepped toward Grady and stopped when he saw the gun in the kid’s hand.
“Go on, now, get,” Grady said.
“Ok, wrangler, but I won’t forget this.”
He stepped onto the stairs, teetered, grabbed the wall and stumbled down. The saloon music never ceased and the doors never shut and the bar always served and the women always smiled.
Shelly blew Grady a kiss. “My hero,” she said and sashayed past him and along the hallway. “I think I’ll lay down for a spell.” She entered a room, shut the door, and bolted the lock.
Alone now, Grady set the gun on the desk top. His hands trembled and he slumped into the seat.
“Ain’t even my shift yet,” he said.
Grady pushed his worn jackboots against the desk and leaned back in the chair. His reddish beard came through in patches, which he had grown under the mistaken notion it aged him past sixteen. He needn’t have worried about people mistaking his youth because his eyes had the hard edge of a man that has outlived a life sentence. Skinny, too skinny, he had only begun to get regular meals since starting work in the saloon a couple of weeks back. With the loss of the quarter, he wouldn’t get to eat until he was paid after the shift.
Truman rushed out of the changing room and came alongside the desk. Wrinkled skin hung off his naked body like saddlebags. Grady had no time to react and the sight of the naked man’s junk in his face left him open-mouthed.
“Where is my gawd-danged money?” Truman’s mouth was twisted in a snarl so vicious he appeared to have lost his lips.
“Sir, you need to cover that up,” Grady said. “You forgot what underwear’s for?”
“My money was stole. All of it. Near fifty dollars. Billfold, too.”
“No, sir, that can’t be. I been out here and seen no one else gone in.”
“No one?”
“Not a soul and sich, sir.”
“How can that be?”
“I dunno, sir. Maybe you mislaid the billfold.”
“Maybe you stole it.”
“No, sir”
“Who else could it be? I’m sure I heard you voice calling out earlier, saying Austin or something.”
“I did,” Grady said. “I called that out. I was early for my shift.”
“Came in early to rob me.”
“No, sir, I ain’t no thief. Don’t steal and don’t lie neither. Look, I’m just trying to do my job and I’m trying to help you best I can, so don’t get worked up before I got a chance to puzzle this through.”
“Where is it? Where have you got it?” Truman grabbed the kid’s pockets and Grady swatted those boney hands away.
“I’ve had a horrible, horrible morning,” Grady said. “But, give me a second, sir, we can work this right like gentlemen. How about you get dressed before someone sees us like this? If the boss came on us now, he’d crack you unconscious and bust you up, some, and I don’t want that to happen.”
“You wranglers are all the same,” Truman said, “always talking so much you think you can talk you way out of anything. You stole my money and I won’t stand for it. I won’t, y’hear?”
“Just put some clothes on.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m in charge.”
“You’re gonna get me my money back or I’m gonna…”
Truman glanced at the gun on the desk. Grady realized what had happened too late. Truman had the gun in his hand and Grady’s blood iced to slush. He kicked back off of the chair, fumbled for the gun, caught Truman’s wrist. They tugged against each other and Grady stumbled onto his feet and they fell against the wall. Truman might have been fifty years older than the kid but he was still stronger. He slammed Grady against the other wall and the kid lost grip on the gun and the barrel swung toward him. Eyes squeezed shut to muster all the strength he possessed, Grady pushed away from the wall, collided with the old man, and continued to push and push and push until a strange thing occurred: he was no longer in contact with Truman. Grady opened his eyes and watched the old man tumble backwards down the stairs.
Grady instinctively followed down after the man. He rounded the corner and Truman lay in a heap at the finish of the stairs, wedged against the wall. Grady went to his aid and found the man’s head bent back upon itself at an impossible angle. The neck had been broken and Truman was dead.
Grady understood what a sneak thief and a dead body meant. He slumped to the floor. Footsteps in the hallway. Austin came in from the bar, the blunt reek of liquor on him. He kept his distance like a man might do when approaching a diseased animal. Austin did not meet Grady’s eyes, but angled his head toward the bar and called, “Damn you, Jolly. Why you always got to get so blind drunk?”
From around the corner, a cheer went up, glasses clinked and the music and dancing took up again.
“What’d you do?” Austin kept his voice low, almost monotonous. “You’d no need to kill him.”
“He fell,” Grady said. “We had this fight”
“Don’t want to know. You got to get this body outta here.”
“Said he was robbed. Just came at me.”
“You listenin’ to me? Someone sees some old naked man that’s dead, they’re gonna know you killed him.”
“He fell.”
“Get him outta here or you’ll swing.”
“Get him outta here?” Grady repeated.
“Yup,” Austin said. “Do your job.”
“He came in during your shift.”
“Ain’t my shift, now. Ain’t my problem. Shouldn’t even be talkin’ to you.”
“Where were you when I come in to work?”
“About.”
“This man was robbed. That’s on both of us. I know no one came in and stole money when I was working.”
“What you gonna do about it?” Austin closed the distance between them and picked Grady up and shoved him against the wall. They were the same age, same height. “What you gonna do?”
“I … I dunno, I…” Grady eyes grew hot and he pushed off Austin and dragged a sleeve across his wet eyes. “What am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t act like you just asked me how I like my steak.”
Grady thought about the man who stole his money that morning. If he lost his job, he wouldn’t earn what the man needed, and people died over less.
“What do I do?”
“Take him out the back door, put some clothes on him, and make it look like he tripped and done his self in. Old man like that, ain’t no one gonna ask questions.”
Grady thought about it for a moment, tried hard not to let his eyes leak, and nodded.
Austin glanced at the crumpled heap that was Truman and backed away from Grady and turned toward the bar. “I’m goin’ for a long drink. Can’t believe you killed him over fifty dollars?” He turned the corner and went into the bar.
Grady heard a mumble of voices which would no doubt lead to the business end of a noose unless he acted quick. His thoughts rang ragged as a tethered coyote. It was something Austin had said. He said fifty dollars. How’d he know the man lost that exact amount of money…? And Austin had been drinking even though yesterday he’d been broke.
Grady studied the corpse in the hope the man would stand and take a bow and folk would clap and he’d laugh because it had all been a prank. But the man wouldn’t get up and Austin was out there in the bar, right that instant, drinking with the dead man’s money. He probably still had the billfold in his pocket.
You go in there, say what you know is true, and it’ll be a fight.
Grady took the gun from out of the dead man’s hand and stood and with the gun held out saw that his hand did not tremble. Tacked to the back wall among other various posters was the advertisement that had brought him to this juncture to begin with: Wrangler Required for the Deadfall Saloon.
The End
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