Blackjack

Quinton removes his hat as he lay on the ground peering over the scene that is spread out just below the ridge. The wind up here never fully stopped; it pushed grit against his cheek and pulled at the brim of the hat he now held flat against the rock so it wouldn't catch and give him away. Below, the last of the daylight was draining out of the sky in long orange bands, and the desert floor was going the color of an old bruise. Quinton, a twenty-something bastard son of a drunk Georgia gold miner and an unlucky Cherokee squaw, mumbles under his breath but loud enough for his horse to hear. One Horse stood a few feet back down the slope, ears swiveling, patient the way only an animal that has seen a man think out loud for years can be patient. Quinton directs his remarks to One Horse, "I bet those wagons use to belong to living folks." Remaining fixated on whatever he is squinting to see, he feels the instrument he holds and without taking away his stare, he extends the optics for a closer look. Through the brass and glass the wreckage sharpened into something worse than a smear of dark shapes — canvas tops slashed and sagging, wheels canted at wrong angles, a scatter of trunks thrown open and picked clean. "It looks like there were six, maybe seven wagons and maybe fifteen or more mules. They are all gone now. Looks like some Comanche sent all the people to see Jesus!" Quinton continues to comment to the horse as he reviews the carnage below, "Damn shame, all the folks and their babies too! I'll bet they all use to be alive yesterday, probably just happened this afternoon. Better stay put 'til it gets dark. Gonna be a bright full moon tonight." He said it plain, the way a man says the weather is turning, because dwelling on it any harder out here in the open was a good way to end up part of the scenery himself.

The light kept bleeding out of the sky until the ridge went from orange to purple to the flat gray-blue of true dusk, and then, right on schedule, the moon came up fat and white over the far rimrock, throwing enough silver across the desert floor that Quinton could pick his way down without a torch. Later, Quinton quietly moves, in the almost daylight by the moon, from wagon to wagon checking the dead and making sure that nobody with any hair left wasn't as dead as they looked. The smell reached him before the details did — blood gone tacky in the heat, and under it something sweeter and worse. He stepped careful, toe first, the way a man moves through a room he doesn't trust the floor of. Quinton hears a whimper followed by a quick "Shhh!" from an overturned wagon a few feet away. Every hair on his arms stood up at once. "What the hell?" Quinton says with a whisper. He carefully crawls on his belly to a position next to the still-smoldering wagon, the canvas above him still ticking faintly as it cooled, a curl of smoke rising thin and gray against the stars. "Who's there? Are you still alive? Let me see your face." Quinton is in a position just inches from having a view under the wagon that reveals the wagon's contents. Quinton strains to view the cargo. Four little girls, probably the sex, and two boys, the oldest was about 12 he thinks and except for one baby, they were all wide-eyed and alive, packed together in that black wedge of shadow like they'd tried to become part of the wagon itself. "I'll be damned! You can put the baby down now," he instructed a little maybe eight-year-old, dead babysitter, she got an arrow through her neck! Quinton's words just inspired the little sad-eyed girl to hug her lifeless baby sister a little tighter, her knuckles white around a bundle that would never again need holding that way. Quinton wants to help the children be at ease so he introduces some sympathy, "I was a baby once!" he declared enthusiastically, his voice pitched soft and foolish on purpose, the kind of foolish that might coax a scared animal or a scared child a half-step closer to trusting him. Quinton strains to lift the wagon's corner and immediately insists that the children exit their hiding place. "Ain't got but one horse, I call him 'One Horse'... guess he'll have to do, let's go."

He got them moving before the moon climbed much higher, on the theory that grief could wait but distance from a burned wagon train could not. The oldest of the boys, a serious child of about twelve who introduced himself as Thomas — "Tommy, Tommy Whitfield, sir" — took it upon himself to organize the other four the way he must have seen his father organize a wagon crew, walking the little ones into a line with his own hands and telling them, low and steady, that Mr. Quinton knew where he was going. The middle girl, maybe nine, would only give her name once Quinton had given his — "Ruth," she said, like she was trading something valuable and wanted fair value back — and the smallest boy, no more than six, wouldn't give a name at all, just held on to Tommy's shirttail and watched Quinton with the flat, unblinking attention of a child deciding whether the world had any more surprises left in it. "That's Eli," Tommy said on the boy's behalf. "He talks when he's ready." The last girl, the one still carrying her baby sister wrapped tight against the cooling night, said nothing whatsoever, and Quinton didn't ask her to. Some things a body works out how to carry before anybody gives them a name for it, and he figured hers was already spoken for.

"There was another girl," Tommy said, once the walking had started and it seemed safe to say it. "Dovie. She was watching the baby. She didn't come out with us." He said it plain, the way a boy learns to say a hard thing when nobody around him has time left over to teach him a gentler way. Quinton didn't ask him to say more, and Tommy didn't offer any. Twice on the walk back to One Horse, Quinton stopped the whole line dead and stood listening with his hand flat in the air, and twice it was nothing — a nightjar working the brush, then later just the wind finding a gap in a rock — but he'd learned a long time ago that the difference between a man who lived to be old and a man who didn't was mostly a matter of how many times he'd stopped to make sure nothing was nothing. One Horse took the news of five children and a bundle without complaint, the way One Horse took most news, and Quinton walked point the rest of the way to Mission Church with his rifle loose in one hand and the little boy's silence riding heavier on him than anything else he carried that night.

Morning light came in low and gold through the saloon's front windows, catching every mote of dust Ben's broom kicked up and turning them into a slow gold weather all their own. "What do you think?" Carla puts her hands on her hips and cocks her head, making eye contact with the fellow sweeping. Carla was pretty featured, but experienced-looking, in her early thirties but probably younger, a working girl, and she'd angled herself in the doorway of the back room so the light fell just right across the old dress. "Well?" she said. "Damn, Carla, already married or not, a fellow would have to be out of his mind not to have carnal desires after gazing on you," remarked Ben, as he got the saloon ready to open, leaning the broom against the bar to give the dress its proper due. "That dress is an accessory worth a 15% surcharge." "Just found it in an old trunk. My momma wore this when my daddy came calling, you like it?" the whore lets one toe peek out the bottom of the dress and then makes a kind of raspy but cute giggle like a school girl on prom night, the sound bouncing off the empty chairs and the long mirror behind the bar. "...better charge an extra 20% and give me 10% for the house," Ben slightly smiles at Carla. "Deal!" squeals Carla, already turning to catch her own reflection over her shoulder. "Quinton gets back soon and I want to surprise him with something different to take off me." "How long has Quinton been gone? I didn't know you two were a toy, I have the feeling you're not going to be wearing that dress very long!" Ben nodded approval at Carla's dress and then untied his apron and hung it behind the bar, the leather loop worn smooth from years of the same motion. Two women with a little blonde pig-tailed girl between them are walking on the wooden sidewalk in front of the saloon as Ben comes through the saloon's iconic swinging doors, the hinges giving their familiar tired creak, the morning air outside already carrying the first dry heat of the day. Ben walks out of the saloon, lights a previously smoked half cigar, cupping the match against a breeze that wasn't really blowing, and says, "Good day ladies." The women nod in response and the little girl just stares, wide-eyed at the big man with the cigar smoke curling around his hat brim. Ben makes a "face" at the little girl to acknowledge the stare, crossing his eyes and puffing out his cheeks until, for just a second, she almost smiled.

Ben looks around taking in the desert air and with every breath is proud to be living in the town of Mission Church. The town wasn't much to look at from a distance — a scattering of clapboard and adobe hunched along one dusty main street, the church steeple the only thing that dared stand taller than the general store — but from where Ben stood it looked like everything a man could reasonably want. Ben kept his horse in a corral behind the saloon. Blackjack was his prized black stallion and "fine animal as black as the night without a moon" was everybody's comment when they saw him, the horse's coat catching what little light there was and giving it back doubled, like poured ink given muscle and breath. Ben won Blackjack in a poker game in St. Louis. The horse was a two-year-old Arabian stallion already called "Blackjack" for some reason, probably because he was black and Jack was the name of his previous owner and Ben liked the name. Ben says it was the luckiest day of his life although he carried a well-hidden ace just in case more "luck" was needed. Ben also won the "Blackjack Saloon," formerly known as "The Full House Saloon," in Mission Church, too. Ben stopped gambling after winning the saloon, said he didn't want to press his luck... and the rest is history.

Blackjack was a member of the family, actually the one and only other member. Ben got drunk one night on some local tequila and put Blackjack in his will, the lawyer in Santa Fe apparently too polite, or too paid, to argue the point. Folks joked after the event that Blackjack was the only grazing animal that owned his own "watering hole." Ben reached into a barrel of dried corn and grabbing a fist full offered it to Blackjack, the kernels rattling dry against his palm. Blackjack gently took the feed from Ben's flattened-out palm, his lips soft and searching, then pranced in the corral holding up his massive neck and showing off his stately bloodline as he did every day, hooves throwing up small clouds of pale dust that hung golden in the slanted morning light. Blackjack was royalty and a symbol of everything that has real value. Not only was Blackjack an exquisite means of travel but owning him made you king. If there was one man that held the respect of everyone, although having whores to manage got a negative comment from Reverend Cross, it was Ben Stafford, and his horse was Blackjack.

Most western little town desert mornings were pretty much uneventful, the kind of quiet where you could hear a rooster three streets over and a woman's laundry line snapping in the wind. But this morning Quinton and five little Indian massacre survivors and one unfortunate baby finally arrived in Mission Church, and the ordinary hush of the street broke apart the moment folks caught sight of them. They were dirty, hungry, tired, and traumatized, the children's faces streaked pale where tears had cut tracks through the trail dust, their small bodies swaying with the kind of exhaustion that goes past sleepy into something closer to numb. Sheriff Turnbull met the group and quickly sent someone to fetch the Stuckey sisters to help tend to the children. The Sheriff, who had kids of his own, started licking his fingers and wiping off the kids' faces as if spit-covered smudges were going to help the matter, his big rough hands moving with a gentleness that seemed to surprise even him. "Poor babies... those damn savages are just plain evil... Comanche, I bet!" said someone in the gathering crowd, and more voices rose up around it, a low murmur thickening into something like a chorus. Everybody hated the Comanche, even other Indian tribes. The Comanche would kill or enslave anyone that wasn't another Comanche, even women and children. "Quinton saved 'em and he's an Injun too!" observed the sheriff. Quinton smiled at the accomplishment comment, though his eyes stayed tired, still seeing wagon wheels tilted against the moonlight. "Quinton's a Cherokee, they might as well be regular folks!" said a well-dressed lady in the crowd. "Half Cherokee," corrected someone else. "Yeah, both halves are good," answered the lady. The crowd was unified in their laughter, a brief release of the tension that had been building since the children first came into view. The children never changed their pained expressions. It spoke volumes about being little, lost, and alone. "Sarah Beth, honey, I can take her now," softly said the well-dressed lady to the little girl, still holding the lifeless baby, crouching down so she was eye level with the child, her voice gone gentle as a hand laid flat, "you took... real good care of her, darling!"

About a mile east of Mission Church was the Stuckey sisters' farm, a low sprawl of house and barn and chicken coop set against a windbreak of scrub cedar that had taken decades to grow that tall. The Stuckey sisters were two senior-age twin sisters who were both widowed during the war for Texas independence. Both of the women had served as nurses for Sam Houston and their farm had one of the first houses near Mission Church. The Comanche let the sisters be because one of the sisters was such a damn good shot that she picked off the war party chief, on two different occasions, with one shot through the forehead! Every woman in Mission Church had bought eggs from the sisters and the Olmstead boys both got their broken arms set by the sisters. "Don't let that greedy rooster get all the goddamn corn!" said one of the sisters, scattering feed in a wide arc across the packed dirt of the yard, chickens boiling around her ankles in a flurry of feathers and noise. "Get some yourself," Dottie directs the hen. "That greedy bastard beats you to it, every time!" Emma was hoeing weeds from the rows of corn while Dottie fed the chickens, the morning sun already warm enough to darken the back of Emma's blouse between the shoulder blades. Dottie hollers at Emma, "I'm going to fry up that scrawny bird if he steals any more feed from my hens, he is not good for nothin'... anymore.. anyway!" Emma hollers back in agreement, "I'll make the gravy!" The chickens frantically scatter out of a horse's way and the cowboy hauls back on the reins as soon as the horse gets next to Emma, dust still boiling up behind him from the ride, "Come quick sisters and bring your nurse's stuff! Quinton found some kids that had their whole families killed by some injuns! They've been moving for days and they seem mighty shook!" The cowboy jumped off his horse and ran into the barn to start getting the mules hitched to the wagon, boot heels loud on the packed earth. "What about the kids, they got any wounds?" yelled Emma and Dottie at the same time like it was rehearsed, both women already dropping hoe and feed bucket in the same instant, moving toward the barn without another word needed between them.

Some folks in the crowd had moved the children to Miss Jullie's Boarding House and were examining the children for injuries when the Stuckey sisters arrived and took charge, the sisters moving through the parlor with the brisk, unhurried competence of women who had bandaged worse under worse circumstances. Emma worked her way down the row of children calling each one by the name Quinton had given her at the door — Tommy, Ruth, Lucy, Eli —checking wrists and ankles and the backs of small necks with the same brisk hands she used on chickens and neighbors alike. "Except for the baby, nothing to see here, except some scrapes, bruises, and burns... thanks to Quinton and the almighty," said Emma, running gentle hands along a small arm, checking for breaks. "All that pain is missin' their folks, poor little things." "The fact they're still alive is a miracle, no thanks to those painted, hair-collecting, smelly heathens," remarked the Reverend, who had entered the house with Charlene, his wife, his boots loud on the boarding house floorboards. "They can all stay with us," said the reverend's wife, already kneeling to be closer to the children's height. "I can feed them and give them a nice warm bed, remember, they got a lot of wounds that we will never see!" The reverend's wife was probably the most beautiful, inside and out, woman that God ever put on this earth, except for maybe Eve herself, and something in the softness of her voice made even the youngest of the orphans look up at her. Ben took off his hat when he saw Charlene from across the street and completely forgot whatever he was talking about but he never let Charlene see any of the sparks she was responsible for. It wouldn't be right to lust after the reverend's wife, at least not so anyone would notice. Carla had walked in right behind Ben, her borrowed church-going composure not quite covering her curiosity. Carla didn't voice her opinion to more than one person at a time — I guess that quality comes with the business — so when Carla expressed, very loudly, what appendage needed to be removed from those heathen Comanche's bodies, everybody sucked in some extra air, especially the reverend's wife. "Mind your language, Carla!" said Ben with kind of a half smile at Charlene, then Carla. Yeah, that Saturday was one of Quinton's most memorable. He saved the orphans from certain death and at the end of the day, he took Carla's momma's dress off Carla.