The Savagers of Cutthroat Canyon

Chapter 2

2

It was a tough year for Silver Vein. More and more of the miners were realizing they would never find silver in the ground. Instead, they were broke and had basically tossed their lives away on a roll of the dice that would never pan out—and they were not remotely happy about it. Many of them became great customers of mine as I own the saloon (Curly's Saloon) in town. There’s another saloon, if you can call it that, and we’ll get to that ugly business shortly. Just as when someone lands a great fortune, when a person realizes the entirety of their one and only life has been one big waste, that at every opportunity, they took a wrong turn—they often turn to the drink. And as long as they don’t puke up their insides on my bar, I let them.

Aside from disillusioned miners, bad men and lowlifes and degenerates and rustlers and scoundrels and bushwhackers and scalawags and brigands and bank robbers and train robbers and just plain robbers of all shapes and sizes were migrating west from the southern states like a disease. With a set of skills left over from the Civil War, skills that mostly had to do with killing folks or blowing folks up or setting folks and their houses on fire, they often looked to the West to put these skills to use.

Silver Vein was a town full of people who hoped they had fled far enough from the bad things in their lives to relax and feel safe. They were attracted to the town because of its peaceful reputation. That, and the silver that was (wasn’t) growing out of the ground like daisies. The citizens of Silver Vein had already had their fill of violence and wanted no more to do with it. So seeing even the occasional ruffian wander into town was enough to put people on edge. A stranger that wasn’t a miner or a local rancher could cause some people to faint straight away.

In January, I was officially voted the town sheriff. The old sheriff, Jim Shepland, a just and great man, had given me the badge from his chest as he lay dying in a puddle of his own blood. And while the town had accepted me as its new sheriff, having been personally chosen by the old sheriff, it wasn’t official until the town voted on it. Only the newspaperman Pap Kickins, editor of The Daily Silver Vein, and Flody, who runs the livery, voted against me. In the case of Flody, I know this because he showed me his ballot in which he simply wrote: “Not Curly.” Pap Kickins wrote an editorial in which he suggested that he himself should be sheriff. His self-endorsement was something that nobody could scarcely believe. He was old, could barely see, was almost always drunk, and had grown all but deaf; he walked about town carrying an ear trumpet in order to hear what people said.

At the time of the vote, I was known as a famous hero and lawman who had freed the town of Silver Vein from the depredations of the depraved rancher Torp Mayfair and his hired henchmen and shootists. The writers back East had elevated me from a saloonkeeper caught up in extraordinary circumstances, which is what I was, to one of the West’s great lawmen—right up there with Wild Bill and Bat Masterson and that no good pimp Wyatt Earp. I was famous wherever highly imaginative dime novels were sold. People knew my name in New York City, Paris, and San Francisco.

I would be lying if I said being famous didn’t go straight to my head. Because it did. I started believing I was the person they said I was instead of the person I actually was. I pranced about the town like a prize rooster, smoking cigars and curating a long, thick, blazingly red handlebar mustache. At one point, I tried to wear a pair of guns in a sash, like Wild Bill, but could never make it work. It’s a tricky thing, wearing a sash, and when you stick guns in one, it tends to ride down the waist and impede one’s walk. And if you forget you’re wearing the sash and the guns, and you sit down, you can squash your nether parts.

When reporters came into town, I’d take them to Kate’s restaurant and talk a blue streak about my own heroics—most of which were things I had read about myself in newspapers from back East that had made their way west—before they ever even asked a question.

I was obnoxious is what it was. One day, Baxter and Merle, my deputies and friends, sat me down and gently let me know I had turned into an asshole.

“Dang Curly, it’s like we don’t hardly know you no more,” Baxter said. I immediately threatened to arrest him for slander, even though he hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true.

“And what’s with all that grease in your hair?” Merle asked. I had taken to slicking down my hair because some artist back East had put me on the cover of a book with my hair slicked back, and I felt obligated to grease up my hair in case some pilgrim showed up looking for it. In short, I had lost my damned mind. I gave my friend Johnny Ringo all manner of grief for feeding the dime store writers what they wanted to hear. And here I was, doing the same thing. It is a heady thing, being a hero, especially if you’re like me and afraid of just about everything. If the town doctor, old Spack Watson, liked to get high on opium and drooled the day away like a leaky plant, I was getting high on my own press.

I immediately discounted Baxter and Merle’s criticisms and walked home. I lived above my saloon with my wife, Sally, and Bart the dog. Sally had been my roommate before we’d fallen in love and gotten married; the only real change in our lives was that we now shared the same straw bed and I no longer had to cook for myself and had therefore gained some inches in the waist. (I also got fussed at if I came up from the saloon after one too many toots of whisky, even though getting drunk was part of my job as a purveyor of whisky.) We also had impressive amounts of s*x with one another; something we didn’t do as roommates because I am a gentleman and didn’t push myself on her or use any of my natural charm.

“Do I look ridiculous?” I asked Sally, running my hand through my slick hair and wiping some extra grease on my pants leg.

“Yes,” Sally said, but she was smiling.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I picked up Sally’s hand mirror and gave myself a look over.

“I thought you would figure it out eventually, or someone would come along and let you know. I figured you were just going through a phase and you would work your way through it.”

“Baxter and Merle accused me of being an asshole,” I said.

“You’re not an asshole, Curly. You’re wonderful. You’re just affected by your fame is all. If it makes you feel better, I never did believe you were anything like the cartoon they say you are in those silly books.”

“You don’t see me as one of the West’s great heroes?”

“Not by a dang mile.” I could see she was trying hard not to laugh.

I didn’t know what to say to all that. Luckily, Bart the dog walked in and propped his furry little paws up on my leg and looked up at me with his little brown dog eyes that seemed to indicate I was still his hero. It helped that I kept jerky in my pocket. An appreciation for jerky was one of the things the two of us had in common.

If it weren’t for my habit of having jerky in my pocket, I never would have met Bart. Bart was a little black-and-white dog I stole a year earlier from Torp Mayfair, who was by then tortured and killed by Comanches and no longer in any position to take care of a dog, even a small one. I was sleeping outside in the dirt at the time, and Bart attacked my pocket and the jerky in there, and our bond was formed.

“Well,” I said, “I believe Bart thinks me a hero.”

“Bart thinks you’re a food dispenser.”

“That too,” I agreed, scratching under the dog’s little white beard. “Dang, Sally, I need to get this grease out of my hair.”

“Thank heaven,” Sally said. Then she came up, put her arms around me, and gave me a hug. She doles out lots of hugs. It’s almost as if we were making up for all the time we’d wasted as roommates and pretended we only thought of one another as friends. Sally liked to nestle her nose up under my neck and kiss on me there, then watch my face turn red as a tomato. I am helpless to stop myself from blushing under such circumstances. Half the women in town made sport of my blushing response, and would often wink at me or blow me a kiss just to see it.

Sally drew me a hot bath and I dunked myself in the water. She helped me degrease my hair. It occurred to me once the grease was out that I hadn’t seen anyone in Silver Vein with grease in their hair. Maybe the undertaker, Steve Pool, would grease his hair if he thought it would help him make some money. Mostly, I figured, it must be a look popular back East and some writer had added it into their story because they didn’t know no better.

“I got my hair back,” I said, running my hands through it and enjoying the fact that it wasn’t slippery.

“I’m very happy about it,” Sally said.

“I suppose I better get back to being the sheriff,” I said. “Baxter and Merle’s criticism had me feeling low. I don’t feel low no more.”

“Good.”

“All I have to do to raise my spirits is come home and look at you,” I said.

“Oh, please,” Sally said, rolling her eyes.

“It’s true,” I said, because it was. “I like coming home to you and Bart. I can walk up the stairs and through the door, and I feel good almost immediately.”

“It is pretty special,” Sally said. “I never would have imagined it even a year ago.”

So we hugged some more, and did some other things you don’t need to know about, and then I made my way to the jail.