Ragtime Cowboys (3 page)

From the dry-rotted interior he drew a bedroll wrapped in a canvas cover, which when he unbuckled the straps and spread on the bed exhaled a gust of cedar. That smell never failed to catapult him back to Matagorda County, Texas—place of his birth—with the restless cattle bawling all about, the sun lying like a hot flat rock on the back of his neck, dust drifting fine as flour and settling on his sweat, turning his skin to sandpaper. And with the cedar came the stench of scorched hair and singed flesh as the iron burned the Rancho Grande brand onto yet another bovine haunch.

*   *   *

“Oh, there you are, Charlie,” said his boss, eyes peering down at him from a tangle of beard like a tumbleweed stuck to his face. “You ought to wear a bell. I near stepped on you.”

“No need, Mr. Pierce. I heard them clod-busters coming the second you stepped off the front porch.”

Abel Head Pierce—“Shanghai” to his intimates, ever since one of them had compared his six-foot-five-inch frame in Spanish dress and huge Mexican rowels to a Shanghai rooster—threw back his head and roared with laughter.

*   *   *

Siringo smiled sourly at the memory. Built on the slight side, with narrow hands and a way of appearing neat in his clothes even after six weeks trailing herds to Kansas, he'd always suspected the rancher kept him on just to serve as his personal court jester. Never mind that he worked as hard as any man in the outfit, and rode up right alongside when Pierce led a party after a gang of rustlers—sometimes straight into an ambush in his rage and eagerness for a fight.

The rancher liked the ruckus so much he'd charge in, pistols blazing, when the easiest thing to do was surround the thieves while they were busy changing the brands and round them up without firing a shot. The lazy bastards always stopped at the first level place and built a fire whose smoke could be seen as far as Houston. There was no detecting in the work, not back then.

Fortunately, Pierce was too big to sit a mustang, and when rich living made him a burden even to his big studs and he took to a buggy, he'd come to see finally that things managed themselves best when he stayed behind, confining his battles to his wife and Mexican servants, who picked fights with him knowing he'd fire them, then hire them back at double wages when he sobered up. It wasn't long after Siringo took charge that the night riders shifted their operations to outfits less likely to dangle them from their own lariats.

People had been underestimating Siringo his whole life. It stung a man's pride, but he acknowledged it had seen him through the fire into old age, when others who stood a head taller and lived twice as loud had been fertilizing the earth for fifty years.

He opened the blanket, its black-and-red checks faded to gray and pink and raddled with moth holes, exposing first his other Colt, a showpiece with gold plate and nacre grips, the mother-of-pearl rubbed by handling to a high finish. He set it aside, to return to its place after he got out what he wanted. The revolver had been presented to him by James McParland, the legendary superintendent of the Pinkerton office in Denver, for his first five years of loyal service, and while Siringo appreciated what it represented, it was only good for the Independence Day parade. Out in the open it caught the sun from every angle and attracted unfriendly fire.

Next he came to his Winchester carbine in its leather scabbard, its brass painted black to cut down on reflection and walnut stock shiny as an outhouse wall where everybody leaned his hand when he pissed. This he propped up in a corner for cleaning, oiling, and loading.

He placed the cleaning kit in its rosewood case and the cardboard box of cartridges on the nightstand, drew the bowie from its chamois sheath, inspected the twelve-inch blade for rust, resheathed it, and laid it on his pillow. The folding spyglass, brass compass, and his lucky rabbit's foot, attached by a cinch ring to his little Forehand & Wadsworth hideout pistol, he laid next to the knife. Then he folded the circus revolver back into the blanket, stowed it and the footlocker back under the bed, locked up, and went to the bank.

The hollow-cheeked clerk behind the wooden cage peered through his spectacles at the draft, holding them like a magnifying lens. He asked him to wait and went through a pebbled-glass door behind the counter marked
PRIVATE.
Siringo didn't begrudge him for seeking a second opinion; he'd bounced a couple of drafts drawn on the bank in the past.

Waiting, he turned and rested his elbows on the counter, overhearing murmured conversations among customers and employees; memorizing noses, ears, moles, visible scars, and postures; noting the time on the big Regulator clock and even the date on the calendar with its steel-point engraving of the bank's Chicago headquarters, corner foremost like the prow of a big solid dependable ship—he'd known an open-and-shut case to fail in court because the detective on the stand got confused and gave a date that didn't match the day of the week. He did all this without thought, and when he realized he was doing it, it annoyed him, like a retired farmer waking up automatically at four a.m. when there were no cows to milk and no hogs to slop.

*   *   *

“Once a detective, always a detective.” Jimmy McParland smiled. “You know, one day last month I jumped out of bed and was half-dressed when it came to me the breakfast appointment I was dressing for belonged to a Molly Maguire who died in prison five years ago.”

*   *   *

Jimmy Mac. He wondered what he was up to. Dead, most like, and no wire column to announce it to readers not yet born when he was saving the lives of their grandparents, and who wouldn't recognize the name. It seemed to him most of the addresses he'd written among the floor plans and pornographic doodles in his dilapidated memorandum book should be forwarded to the cemetery. Who was left to lug his own coffin from the parlor to the planting ground?

Then again, wasn't that the idea?

“Thank you for your patience, Mr. Siringo.”

The clerk's spectacles were back on his nose where they belonged and his tone had gone up a hitch or two in the cordial department: A single telephone call to Earp's bank had wiped out all past transgressions. If the last century had been built on determination and individual initiative, this one was constructing itself on net worth. Siringo, watching the sickly little man deal notes onto the counter, was not inclined at the moment to question the system.

He kept out a hundred for expenses and deposited the rest. Folding the notes into a shirt pocket, he remembered the streetcar. “Dollar in change, please.”

The man obliged. “Please come again.”

“I hope to.” He touched the brim of his Stetson and caught the car out front just as it was starting away from the curb.

The motorman scowled at him from his tractor seat. “Don't be so impatient, old-timer. Next time you might leave a grease trail clear to the Valley.”

Siringo said nothing, dropping his nickel into the slot and unconsciously committing the man's lobeless ears and turnip-shaped nose to memory.

*   *   *

Back home, he unscrewed the socket from an electric lamp that needed rewiring, stuffed the banknotes into the cavity, and replaced the socket. Then he traded his moccasins for a pair of calf-length Kip boots, thrust his Colt under his belt, hung the Winchester in its stiff scabbard on his shoulder by the strap, and went out the back door with a handful of .44 shells in each pocket next to his pipe, matches, and tobacco. He brought along his canteen and bean sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and stashed inside his shirt.

The scrubby brush was still wet, and by the time he reached the base of the
HOLLYWOODLAND
sign his boots were soaked, but the thick lumberman's socks he wore underneath kept his feet warm and dry. He'd learned from experience to take especial care of his feet. The cowboys he'd ridden with in early days had been contemptuous of their lower extremities, considering them no fit transportation for a man broken to the saddle; but horses gave out, often before men, and a fellow who bore up under conditions of thirst and hunger and heat and cold and exhaustion folded like a canvas bucket at the first blister.

His bad knee grieved him worse as he climbed. He limped under the best of conditions, but he was usually able to dissemble it with his rolling prairie walk. He stopped from time to time and stood like a crane with the leg bent a little until the throbbing flattened out, more or less.

He pulled himself up the last few yards to the top by grasping fistfuls of grass and the trunks of firs, then unslung the scabbard, took off his hat, and mopped the leather sweatband with his bandanna, chugging like a locomotive and listening to his heart walloping in his chest. It skipped every fourth beat; but it had been doing that since he was a yonker. The sawbones who plastered his splintered knee in Texas had told him his “unpunctual heart” would do for him before he was forty. He drew the same bad hand from the doctor who stitched him up after he got bucked into barbed wire at Longmont. According to medical science he'd been dead a quarter-century.

He sat in the grass, dry now where the sun beat down on it, unwrapped his lunch, and ate beans between thick slices of coarse bread, washing them down with water from the canteen. Then he smoked his pipe, gazing down at the back of the eyesore sign and
Ciudad de Los Angeles
creeping out in every direction from its dusty little start, the good homely adobe missions blending into stucco and red tile, concrete and macadam poured over ancient bones. The swimming pools of the picture players looked like turquoise chips scattered by a careless jeweler. Trust a New York City cowboy like Bill Hart to come to the desert for a swim.

The sun was still high above the ships moored off Santa Monica, but when it slipped this side of the hills he would be making his way back down in the dark. The bones were too brittle for that. He knocked out his pipe, got up, opened his fly, and let water onto the glowing ash, then buttoned up and thumbed fresh loads into the revolver and carbine.

He spent a pleasant hour plugging trunks and branches, a clod of earth and grass flung high, which made a satisfying burst when he connected, like Bill Cody's blown-glass balls in the arena, not as pretty but just as easy to mark your progress. He'd hoped to spot a coyote or a rabbit, some moving target to measure his skills against, but they weren't cooperating that day. He speared the sheet of waxed paper from the sandwiches on the end of a ponderosa branch where it caught the breeze, paced off a hundred yards, turned, fired at it first with the Winchester, then with the Colt, standing with that weapon sideways to the target with the barrel parallel to his arm and shoulder, until he'd exhausted his rounds. His ears rang and his hand throbbed.

When he went back to inspect the result, he was dissatisfied. It was possible he'd put a few rounds through the tears he'd opened earlier, but as many as he'd spent, the piece of paper should have been obliterated. Raw yellow wounds showed in branches above and below where he'd fired wide.

Well, there wasn't likely to be shooting in the thing. Horse thieves were cowardly types, ready to leave a man on foot in hostile country, but not so quick to trade fire when there was a hole big enough to crawl into handy. Which was why you hung them when taking them into custody was inconvenient. He didn't reckon turning the century had made any modern improvements in their
cojones.
Siringo himself had never made much use of his ordnance other than the ornamental. He'd shot to cover himself and others, hurling swarms of lead more hazardous to the indigenous wildlife than the opposing parties, and when there wasn't a less valuable bludgeon within reach he'd made use of the handle end, but an assumed name and a good line of gab had always been his weapons of choice.

Jesus Mary, though, a man was reluctant to acknowledge he'd lost ground.

It wasn't his eyes, just rust. Rust and the old-man shakes and too much thinking. You could scrape off the first through practice and conquer the second with determination, but when the bump of intelligence grew so big it got in the way of your target, there wasn't much you could do about it except drink, and that would put a big dent in the travel expenses.

 

4

He stuck his ticket inside his sweatband and smoked his pipe on the bench in the station waiting. On one side of him sat a couple with a little girl dressed all in yellow with an enormous bow on top of her head and on the other a thickset Mexican in overalls holding a fat hen on his lap. Siringo wondered if he'd had to buy a ticket for the chicken.

His train arrived on time, and he rode to San Francisco reading the
Los Angeles Express,
watching the scenery, and eating a bean sandwich he'd packed to save the expense of the dining car. The Mexican with the hen got off in Santa Barbara, where an even thicker-set woman greeted him on the platform with four children in tow and a rooster under one arm. Siringo reckoned he'd witnessed the beginning of a poultry empire.

In San Francisco he made his way to the post office and found a telegram waiting for him in care of General Delivery. He'd sent a wire that morning to an address Earp had given him, and here was the reply:

LOOKING FORWARD TO OUR COLLABORATION STOP ADMIRED TWO EVIL ISMS

HAMMETT

His relationship with automobiles was tenuous, and he rode the high old Daimler taxi with both hands on the blanket rail. The driver spat tobacco out the side of the car and kept up a running commentary on how far San Francisco had gone to pot during his residency.

“You can't buy a Chinese girl off the street corner anymore, that's for sure.” Siringo slid to the middle of the seat to avoid the backsplash.

He got useful information finally when he asked if there was a hotel near his destination. The driver said the St. Francis was two blocks from it. “The bellhops know some good bootleggers.”