Chapter 3: A Friendly Drink
The small lobby of the hotel was still empty as Green went back to his room. He
loaded the rifle and put the boxes of cartridges in his saddle bags from which
he took out an empty soap powder tin. He filled it with matches, snapped the lid
shut and stuck it in his shirt pocket, putting the rest of the matches in his
saddle bags. He took the Winchester with him when he left.
The bartender had a twelve gage lever action lying on the bar. A dozen square
tables filled the room. Green took one facing the doorway in the darkened back,
away from the front windows, and ordered tequila, laying the rifle on the table.
The bartender, a bald-headed man with a neatly trimmed mustache, lost some
height as he stepped from behind the bar. Green saw that his legs had been
amputated just above the knees. For walking he had padded leather cups around
the stumps. He wore a red and white vertically striped shirt without the collar.
"Most folks are surprised when they first see me do that -- steppin' out," he
said grinning as he placed a glass and bottle on the table. Standing on the
stumps he was about four feet tall.
"Got a plank sittin' on some old powder kegs to walk on." He nodded toward the
bar. Lost 'em in the war. Didn't have the three thousand dollars Lincoln wanted
to get out of serving, and since they shot you if you didn't serve, I didn't
figure I had much choice. Didn't reckon on losin' my legs though or I'd of
hightailed it for parts unknown."
He dipped his head and raised his shoulders as if to say it was all in the past
-- what the hell.
"Anything else?" he asked.
Green hesitated. All he wanted was a few drinks to mellow out and relax, but he
hadn't had anything to eat since early morning and only beans and jerky, at
that, washed down with a cup of bitter, hot coffee made from re-heated grinds.
"Got anything to eat?"
The bartender nodded.
"Elena," he called out toward a curtained doorway in back. "Tostados, por
favor."
"Si, si, Raymond," a woman's voice replied.
Green could hear chair legs scrapping on the hard clay floor and presently the
light clatter of metal ware. He rolled a cigarette and smoked while waiting. The
tequila burned all the way down, but it did the trick. He poured himself
another, and it went down better. For the first time in many days he was
beginning to feel relaxed.
Elena was a shapely Mexican wearing a white blouse and green skirt. She smiled
at him and sat down a steaming plate of beans and melted cheese on open-faced
tortillas and a steaming cup of coffee.
Green, despite his hunger, ate with a moderate amount of deliberation and, when
finished, slowly rolled another smoke as Elena poured him a second cup and took
up the empty plate.
"Ease tare anyteeng else I you can do, senor?" Her eyes were making sultry
bedroom promises.
Green glanced at the bartender, Raymond, who was reading a newspaper at the bar
and paying them no mind. Green wondered if the woman was his wife or a whore or
both.
He shook his head. A flicker of disappointment registered in her dark eyes
before she turned and disappeared through the curtained doorway.
As Green poured some tequila in the second cup of coffee, the front door opened
and a huge, broad man with a beer belly entered. He was wearing a gray shirt and
trousers and a Colt forty-five on his hip. A silver badge was pinned to his
deerskin vest. He had black stubble on his face as if he hadn't shaved in a
couple of days. A thick, walrus mustache covered his upper lip.
He paused just inside the doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light,
picking his teeth with a toothpick. He fixed his eyes on Green but spoke to the
bartender.
"How's it going, Stubs?"
The bartender glanced at him with a look of loathing but didn't reply.
The big man with the badge chuckled.
"Who we got sittin' over there?" he asked, addressing the bartender again but
kept his cold eyes fixed on Green. His cheeks were raised as if he were smiling,
but it was hard to tell because of the thick mustache.
"Why don't you ask him, marshal?" Raymond answered.
The marshal chuckled again, lowered his hand and hooked his thumb in his vest
pocket. He moved the toothpick around slowly with his tongue for a spell before
addressing Green.
"You got a name, mister?"
Green let out a small sigh. He didn't have much use for lawmen. Most that he'd
known were corrupt, and a corrupt man with a badge is dangerous.
"Yep."
"Well, let's have it."
"John Green," he answered, rolling another smoke, fingers deft and steady. When
he finished, he stuck it between his lips and flared a match off the edge of the
table and lighted it. He returned the marshal's hard stare without flinching and
blew a cloud of blue smoke into the air between them.
"That your real name?"
"It'll do."
The marshal chewed on the end of the toothpick as if deliberating his next
course of action, braking off eye contact.
"Give me some whiskey, Stubs; you know the brand."
Raymond took a bottle of Jack Daniels off the shelf behind him and placed it on
the bar along with a glass.
The marshal placed the glass over the neck of the bottle and picked it up with
his left hand, leaving his right hand free. He walked back to Green's table
shuffling his feet arrogantly on the clay floor.
"Can't stand that Mex shit," he said, glancing down at the bottle of tequila in
front of Green.
He pulled a chair -- thick with peeling green paint -- back from the table and
sat down.
"Hope you don't mind me joining you, Mister Green."
Spitting out the toothpick, he placed a broad hand flat on the table, fingers
spread wide. With the other he lifted the glass off the bottle neck, thumbed the
cork out and poured a couple of ounces into the glass and downed the amber
liquid with one quick swallow.
"Aaah, that puts everything right," he sighed. He poured another couple of
ounces out but merely played with the glass, turning it in his hands. He fixed
Green with a sly look.
"Got business in Red Rock, Green?"
"Nope. Just drifting."
This answer didn't seem to sit well with the marshal who shifted his square jaw
slightly forward, his mouth drooping open, baring the lower teeth like a
bulldog. He gave Green an insolent look through half-lidded eyes.
"Kinda rough territory to be drifting through what with renegade skins on the
warpath."
Green shrugged.
"Though what makes it doubly rough, pilgrim, is that this is Loomis territory.
Three million acres as far as you can see in any direction all belong to Mr.
Loomis, and Mr. Loomis he don't like no strangers hanging round on his property.
And that goes for Red Rock, too. He owns the town lock, stock and barrel.
"Does that include you, marshal?"
The marshal sneered.
"A smart man savvies how the game is played and either goes along with it or
gets his ass reamed. Get my drift?"
"Like I said, marshal, I'm just passing through minding my own business. Soon as
I rest up for a day or two I'll be on my way." He took a final draw off his
cigarette and dropped it in a brass spittoon setting next to the table. It made
a faint hiss.
"I'd do just that, if I were you," the marshal replied. "Ain't healthy round
here."
He tossed the rest of his whiskey off, sat the empty glass down hard on the
table and scrapped back his chair, standing up.
"Well, Mister Green, nice talkin' to yuh," he said with a slight bob. Enjoy your
stay in Red Rock." He put his hand casually on the butt of his pistol. "Just
don't enjoy it too much." The eyes were as dead-staring as those of a fish in a
pescaderia.
"Put the whiskey on my tab, Stubs," he said, chuckling as he swaggered out.
"On my tab my ass!" Raymond blurted irritably after the marshal was gone.
"That'll be the goddamned day whenever that cocksucker ever pays for something.
If I wasn't fucked up, I'd show the bastard a thing or two!"
"I take it you don't like the marshal," Green said calmly.
"You take that goddamn right! Fuckers not even a marshal, just a constable -- if
even that. The high sheriff never even appointed him. The self-satisfied asshole
thinks he's God. Takes anything he wants and never pays for it. And I don't mean
just me. He does it to everyone. Clothes, shave and a haircut, a woman; you name
it, he gets it free. And all because he's Loomis' man. Old Cordel Loomis is the
most powerful rancher in the territory and he appointed Harry Tibbs, our
so-called marshal, to keep an eye on things in this part of the county.
Son-of-a-bitch is just a hired gun . . ." The bartender paused, shaking his head
as if aggravated by a fly, "but, much as I dislike him, I'll have to give him
this: he knows how to handle a six-shooter. He's fast and he's deadly."
Raymond turned and pointed to a playing card -- a three of clubs -- stuck
beneath the edge of a large mirror on the wall above a rack of bottles.
"You see that," he said pointing to three bullet holes in the card. A silver
dollar would have almost covered them.
"He did that at twenty paces. Sounded like one shot. That's how fast he was. Man
don't want to mess with him when it comes to shootin'. And old man Loomis's got
a bunch more of them just like Tibbs working for him. Not cow punchers but
shootists. Men he hired to keep the settlers and small ranchers in their place.
He's got the biggest spread around. Besides his hired thugs, he's got maybe a
hundred and fifty to two hundred legitimate cowpunchers working for him. Like
Tibbs said , the greedy, old bastard's got over three million acres, but he not
satisfied with that. He won't be happy till he has driven off all the squatters
and taken their land too."
Green nodded. It was an old story. Greed was the fuel that drove the human race
as far as he could tell.
While Raymond cleared Tibbs' side of the table, Green rolled another smoke and
stared at the bottle of cactus juice as if its ancient fluids -- brewed down
from countless eons of shifting desert sands, heat, cold and emptiness -- could
whisper a sage solution. He'd drunk too much. He would have one last drink and
hit the hay. He was tired but floating on a peaceful cloud.
