Bart Hazeleton.
It was a name he wished he could forget. But, Cornelius Magnus wasn’t much better. As Bart, he saw that gut shot boy, Owen. As Magnus, he saw Kate laying in the bed with her amputated arm, heard her saying, “A man keeps his word.”
He tapped his shot glass on the bartop.
It was midafternoon and hot as blue blazes in the desert town of Goodenough. No trees about, so folks crammed themselves into the smoky shade of the saloon. Out of the six in the town, he was inside the nicest one. There was green wallpaper on the wall above the chair rail and, below the rail, the dark wood paneling shone in the dim light. Brass sconces and brass chandeliers hung from the ceilings. The chairs were velvet. Some were wingback, puffy, and full of buttons. Chesterfield style is what it’s called. The men sitting in them sat with their legs crossed, and they chuckled through toothy smiles, and their mustaches gleamed with wax (not a hair out of place), and they smoked cigars the size of bratwursts, checking their gold pocket watches from time to time. Around the octagonal tables spread throughout the large saloon, men played Poker. They talked in hushed voices, cash money piled high on the tables, as a man at the upright piano played Chopin.
Women glided about the tables. Large feathers bobbed in their hair. Ringlets of blonde, auburn, and black dangled over bare shoulders. Their short, puffy dresses swayed from hourglass hips, swinging like handbells, ringing with coquettish giggles. They trailed their fingers along the rich men’s shoulders.
Bart clung to the bar, same as Ishmael to Queequeg’s coffin after the shipwreck of the Pequod, floating amidst the gentle din of music and pleasure rippling about him. He sat at the end of the long, glossy bar. Alone, save a brass statue of a fox there in front of him. Its tail was tucked between its hind legs as it slunk behind a log, its head raised and gazing back over its shoulder, back across the bar toward another pair of statues: one in the middle and the other at the opposite end. The middle one was of a pack of hounds, barking, clamoring over one another in their frozen pursuit of the fox. The farthest one of three English riders on horseback, standing in their stirrups. The barkeep filled the little glass and Bart raised his whiskey to the fox.
Behind him and to his right, the double doors that marked the entrance of the saloon were wide open. Contrasted with the dusky den, the desert sun was so bright that light draped the portal like a blinding curtain, blocking the view beyond the batwing doors to the outside world. Hot air wafted inside, wringing sweat from Bart slouched over the bar.
A shadow materialized in the doorway, peering over the batwings, scanning the shadowy saloon. She stepped inside, the batwings fluttering behind her.
The light clung to her as she entered the shadowed den. Her face was as radiant as the pearly full moon. A divine being gracing the world of darkness, here to guide all who linger in the shadows to realms of beauty and delight. She was an image carved out of alabaster. Freckles graced the subtle undertones of pink on her cheeks. She was like the visages that Michalangleo carved or the women painted so often by the up and coming pre-Raphaelites. She seemed to have stepped out of a Greek myth. Another Helen whose beauty could start a war. But, between her full lips, she bit down on a cigar. She paused at the entrance, surveying the landscape. Her eyes were large and glinted like cut emeralds, not a bit of self-doubt shading them as everybody in the saloon stopped what they were doing and stared. Even the piano man had stopped playing.
Her curly red hair was fashionably bundled on top of her head, a small blue hat pinned at a rakish angle. A single long ringlet dangled down onto the lapel of her blue jacket. She wore riding britches and her shiny, leather boots went nearly up to her knees.
When her eyes fell on the lone figure at the bar, the woman’s red lips, like a worm, curled into a grin. She took the cigar out of her mouth and nodded toward all within the saloon. “Carry on, gentlemen.”
The piano began again with Chopin’s Nocturnes, as the din of murmur and chatter filled the room like hydrogen in a zeppelin. The sporting women went about their wiles, going about between the tables of men like feral dogs, nipping at each other, sniffing and prowling, till they found any scrap, whether it be a dollar bill or a sip of whiskey, anything that could stave off their appetite, even if only for a few moments. But, the woman in blue stalked like a wolf, eyeing the ideal kill.
The woman approached Bart, the heels of her boots tapping on the boards.
Bart shook his empty glass for the barkeep as the woman sidled along his right hand side and petted his back, combing it gently with her nails. Bart’s eyes flickered toward her. She smiled, dimpling the alabaster cheeks, her lips stretching, till they were sharp and thin as a stiletto knife. His face drifted away from her to the hunted fox.
“How did you find me?”
She passed behind him, from the right to left, the fingers of one hand tiptoeing across his back. Her floral perfume coiled about him like a python. She tossed a rolled up newspaper on the bar. Esau Slayer was printed in bold black letters across it.
“Wasn’t too difficult,” she said.
He nodded. “Perhaps I need to work on my disguise.”
She barked a quick laugh and leaned on the bartop next to him. She flashed two fingers at the barkeep, and then she set her hard, emerald eyes on Bart. “I would view it as a test to see if I truly know you, body and heart.” She placed her warm hand on top of his, but he withdrew his out from beneath it. “I believe I could find you even if I were blind for we are one.”
Bart shuttered.
The woman smiled. “What was it that St. Augustine said at the loss of his dear friend? ‘What madness, to love a man as something more than human.’”
The barkeep came. He refilled Bart’s empty glass and gave a new glass to the woman. Bart ran his finger around the rim of the glass. “The Clever Cora LaRouche. What does she know about love?”
The woman sipped her whiskey, studied Bart, then lit her cigar, puffing thick plumes of purple smoke. “I’ve read about your exploits in the paper, Dr. Magnus. Quite daring. Brave even.”
Bart threw his head back and downed his whiskey. He shivered all over and then slouched on the bar, limp as a cooked noodle. “ ‘My soul is burdened, bruised, and bleeding. It is tired of the man who carries it, but I can find no place to set it down and rest.’ ”
The woman came in closer, their shoulders touching. “We read that passage together didn’t we? And what else did he say? Hmm? Ah, I remember: ‘Where can the heart find refuge from itself?’ ”
“ ‘Where can I go, yet leave myself behind?’ ” Bart mumbled, his words beginning to slur. “ ‘Was there any place where I should not be a prey to myself?’ ”
The woman blew a smoke ring. “ ‘None.’ ”
Behind them, the tables teemed with gambling and flirting. The noise falling like a gentle rain. Bart managed to lift his head long enough to stare into the large mirror on the wall behind the bar. In the mirror, Cora was like a poem, a song, or a dream. A draft of beauty that woke and stirred the heart to feel the inexpressible heights of joy or the lonely halls of melancholy.
“Why have you come, Cora?”
“You owe me, Dr. Magnus.”
“That’s not my name anymore.”
“What is it now? Peter? John? Martin? Ulrich? Balthasar Hubmaier? That one’s my favorite.” She chuckled, leaning closer till her lips brushed his ear as she whispered “What gall, to bastardize the name of such holy men.” She guided his chin, turning his face. “That’s what I loved about you. Nothing’s sacred.” And then kissed him, tilting her head, slithering her tongue between his pressed lips.
The barkeep froze in the middle of cleaning a glass, his eyes wide. Cora pulled away from Bart, leaving his head hanging there in the air. She puffed the cigar. “Remember now what you gave up?”
Bart touched his fingers to his lips, then looked at his fingertips, inspecting them as you might when someone tells you your lip is bleeding. “Tastes like an ashtray.”
Cora raised her eyebrows and gawked, only for a moment, then she threw her head back and laughed, pounding the bartop with her fist. “Gentlemen! Next round is on me!”
The men of the tables hooted and hollered as chairs scraped and dozens of booted feet thundered toward the bar. They squeezed in tight, shoulder to shoulder, pressing in like hogs at a trough. Peppered with compliments and comments, Cora beamed, her hands on her hips, pinching the cigar between perfectly white teeth as she smiled. The sporting women were ferrying trays full of beer glasses to divvy out to the men that couldn’t make it to the bar.
After a few dozen, Thank you, ma’ams, she plopped back on her stool and draped her arm over Bart’s slumped shoulders, where it hung, like a snake from a branch, and her finger, flickered like a forked tongue, curling a bit of his black hair on his temple. “How’s Kate doing?” she asked into his ear, over all the thirsty clamor.
He glanced at her with big, watery eyes.
Cora pouted, “Did she break your heart?”
He hung his head and as Cora patted his back. “You were always a bit sensitive, Copernicus.”
“It was Cornelius.”
“I can’t keep up with all the names. But, I remember Jake.” And she brought her lips close to his ear and giggled softly as she bit down her bottom lip. “Our first night together.”
“It was a lie.”
“A lie? Truth? What does it matter? So long as you get what you want? You and I, whatever our names, we’re real.”
“Let me alone, Cora.”
She sat upright, snatching her arm from his shoulders. Holding her cigar in one, she drained the glass of beer and slammed it down. “This Kate did a number on you.”
“It’s everything, Cora,” Bart sat up on the stool. His eyes wide and glazed. His cheeks flushed. “Every Goddamn thing we did. All of it! It’s hanging over me like a goddamn guillotine.”
Cora held the stare, as the piano man played Fur Elise. “That boy, Owen, he was shot in the stomach.”
Bart sighed, slumping on the stool.
“For a week, he would’ve been in pain,” Cora said, “His belly would’ve swelled. Gone all purple and yellow.”
“We could’ve taken him to a doctor,” he said, but she shouted over him, her words coming as fast as his, “And he would’ve been sweating and hurting, yelling through the night! Crying for his mother! A week of agony before he died!”
They both sat at the bar, each one silent, as the saloon teemed all around. Smiles downing whiskey.
“It was thirty miles to the nearest town,” she finally said, puffing the cigar. “A hard thirty miles. He wasn’t going to make it.”
Bart drank his beer. “He trusted me. I had given him my word. A man keeps his word.”
“Since when did you care about a thing like that? I remember you giving me a line. You didn’t care about your word then.”
Bart stared into his glass. Down at the rim of bubbles on the piss colored liquid. It even reeked of piss. But, already, his thoughts were a swirl, feelings spinning around his head like flies caught in a tornado. Not a chance of any alighting on a nook of his brain long enough for him to focus and think. Even Owen’s face was a blur. Kate’s too. Overtaken by the swirl of alcohol, overtaken by a growing, heavy burden to sleep.
Cora blew a smoke ring. “You need to take it easy on yourself, Jake. That’s what I’m going to call you, by the way. Cornelius Magnus seems a bit pretentious and you my lover are far from any haughty status.”
“Jake isn’t my name,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. I like it.” She cradled his chin again, turning his face toward her, smooshing his cheeks so his lips pursed like a fish. Her emerald eyes were hard, the facets shimmering with only the lights of the outerworld. Bart struggled to keep his eyes open and he let his head fully rest in her hand. She almost toppled out of the stool, so overwhelmed by the sudden application of the weight of the man’s head. Quickly, she pinched the cigar between her teeth and caught Bart with both hands, shoving him off so he laid back on the bar.
“You were always a bit of a teetotaller,” she said. “Things change, but men sure don’t.”
“You’re wrong,” Bart slurred. “I’m not a man. Men keep their word.”
Cora smirked. “Who would’ve figured the bank teller would’ve had a spine. An unforeseen hitch. But now, it seems that the unknown doesn’t have to be so unknown.”
Bart furrowed his brow, squinting at her in the mirror. She smiled at him, as his own head swayed like an apple stuck on top of a cornstalk. He folded his arms on the bar and laid his head down.
“Barkeep,” Cora whistled, pulling a fifty dollar bill from a coin purse that was stowed in her jack pocket. She threw it down on the bar. “For the drinks, sir. And perhaps a room for me and my friend.”