Blackjack

4

I had first laid eyes on Boston Bill Black on a dark rainy night not long after he showed up in Appaloosa. I’d heard about his arrival and I knew he was an imposing character. His reputation as a gun hand, rounder, and raconteur preceded him, too, but then again, there are always two sides to a coin.

It was late in the evening when I stopped in for a whiskey at the Boston House that I saw the big man. I thought it was amusing or half interesting that a man named Boston Bill Black was in the Boston House Hotel Saloon. There he was, bigger than life, dealing cards in the gambling parlor just off the main barroom. He was seated at a corner table with three other fellas, dapper mining executives. I could tell by the stacks of the chips they were playing a high-stakes game of ventiuna; that was the common name for the game in the southwestern parts of the country. Some people called it twenty-one. Others... most... called it blackjack.

Boston Bill was an impressive-looking gent, no doubt. He was as big and strong as any man I ever saw. His neck, forearms, and wrists pushed outward on the fine fabric of his long jacket like the cylinders that drove and powered the wheels of a locomotive. I got myself a whiskey and took a seat at the end of the bar next to Pearl, a half-Cherokee, half-black whore from the Indian Territory. We had a connection, Pearl and me. Her father was a marshal, killed in the line of duty when he was working for hanging Judge Isaac Parker. Pearl was good at her profession and very nice to look at in her silky dresses that always exposed her strong, bare shoulders, but she was also unusual for a working woman. She was college-educated, smooth with conversation, political, and unafraid to speak her mind. She lived with another woman named Bernice and had only one main interest in men, and that was their money. Pearl was a friend, and as friends often do, she felt inclined to fill me in on some details she’d personally gathered regarding Boston Bill Black and his proclivities.

She glanced back over her brown shoulder at him sitting at the table, telling tall tales to his flip-card partners, and told me she had given him a ride two nights previous. She said that besides the fact he liked to gab a bit and was full of shit, he was rough with her.

“How so?” I said.

“Oh, he needed to turn me every which way,” she said. “Like a damn origami or some such, Everett. Like he was trying to fix me into something I wasn’t, and in the process he needed to whip me, spank me, like a cow... I didn’t mind it, though. Some men are that way. Not you, of course, Everett, you are a gentleman. I believe it has to do with them being pulled from the teat too soon. Malnourishment obviously does not always have an effect on physical growth, but it most certainly affects the brain. The premature lack of nutrition causes them to feel the need to take out their aggression on the weaker sex, a manifestation of their need to be dominant though they are really just lacking in solid character... Something you know nothing about, Everett.”

She laughed, looked back at him, and studied him for a moment.

“Boston goddamn Bill,” she said, shaking her head as she turned back to me. “I don’t think that is where he is from, either, Boston. I think he is from the West, someplace.”

Pearl smiled at Wallis as he strolled up behind the bar, cleaning a glass with a cotton towel.

“Wallis, my dear,” Pearl said, “may I have some of that fine brandy?”

“You know it,” Wallis said as he picked up a fancy bottle that was displayed in front of the silver-backed mirror behind the bar.

“I’m telling Everett about the molehill that comes in the form of a mountain.”

Wallis smiled and set the clean glass in front of Pearl and poured her a shot of brandy, then rested both his hands out wide on the bar, facing Pearl and me.

“I told Boston Bill,” she said, “that he reminded me of an Oregon man and it made him mad... I kind of knew it would make him mad, but I don’t really care.”

She laughed and spoke as if she were imitating him. “I am not from softwood country, you should know that, be able to tell that about me, darlin’. I’m from eastern, hardwood country, east of the mighty Mississippi, where hickories, gums, maples, oaks, and walnuts grow, and not from the western softwood country of cedars, hemlocks, pines, spruces, and firs.”

She shook her head.

“Pat Cromwell said he’s known him for a long time,” Wallis said. “Pat said he put eight notches on the handle of his Colt while he worked the big boats up and down the Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, and Mississippi.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve not had the pleasure.”

An older gentlemanly-looking man in a natty gray suit came in from the hotel and peered into the bar. Wallis nodded to Pearl; she turned, seeing him at the same time he saw her. She turned back to Wallis and me, then slipped off the stool.

“Time for a bedtime story,” she said, and moved away to greet him.

I looked back to Boston Bill, whose chips appeared to be growing.

“Dyes the gray out of that mustache,” Wallis said, eyeing Boston Bill.

“No doubt,” I said.

Virgil had seen Boston Bill up close when he purchased a big buckskin geld from Salt at the livery. He introduced himself to Virgil, and it was then that Virgil grew suspicious and cautious of him. Virgil said Black proudly opened his long jacket to show he was not heeled. Said he was no longer a man that carried a gun. Said he’d been on both sides of the law and shot a good number of men in his time, but that those days were behind him now.

Regardless of who Boston Bill Black was or was not or where he was from or where he currently was located, he was now in our jurisdiction and was most assuredly wanted for murder.