1. The Pansifter
Consider this old bastard.
Arthritic hands malformed. Overlapping veins traveling across every bony hill and valley. A limp mustache masking his dry-lipped mouth, his black spotted gums, his broken teeth. His stained clothes, all desiccated and stiff and there a pearl handled revolver on his hip, shining almost mockingly in contrast with the rest of his ragged form.
His name was Fenn.
He sat in the Pansifter's Saloon in Virgin Alley nursing some watered down beer, leering through the opaque window glass at the procession of drunkard miners fighting and vomiting and firing their pistols into the star-flooded California sky.
He liked the Pansifter and its sawdust floors.
Its prime cut whores.
Its bar tops made of old barn doors.
Despite the watered down liquor, it was the only saloon in Bodie that allowed a man to wear his guns without checking them at the bar. It didn't matter much that a man had to drink twice the amount of alcohol at the Pansifter just to get to the point where he was comfortable in his own skin. This old bastard knew he would never be comfortable without his .44 Colt sitting high on his hip, no matter how much liquor he got in his belly. They could keep the Maison Dore or the Philadelphia Beer Depot or any other fancy-assed den of iniquity. Those places were for dandies anyhow.
2. Joe Hershey and the 27 Sons of Bitches
Fenn’s pocket watch flipped open at the flick of a blackened fingernail and the faint chime of Bach bled into the music of profanity and the drumming of gunfire. It was 10:12 and those sons of bitches were twelve minutes late. This old bastard had no tolerance for tardiness.
He was once involved in a bank robbery in Missouri with his friend Joe Hershey. He was watching the pair of switch-off ponies by the crick as Joe robbed the bank. Only Joe was 48 minutes late and Fenn just left. Just up and left. Joe got down the hill on his own exhausted pinto, and when he saw just the crick and no ponies he thought, "Son of a bitch." and then his pinto collapsed, and the posse caught up and shot him 27 times as he rolled down the hill, and he thought "Son of a bitch." for every shot until he died.
27 sons of bitches and he was face down in a crick that now ran with his own blood. Fenn never had another thought on the matter. Joe Hershey shouldn’t have been late.
3. Billy
Fenn kept sipping his beer in the Pansifter, angry in his guts. Thirty-one more minutes passed and he’d had enough. He whispered a solitary goddamn and stood up to leave, so of course not a minute passed before the batwing doors swung open. Fenn sat back down and watched the doors. It was them. Those sons of bitches arrived singing profane miner songs about cunnies and peckers and tits.
Billy Black Beans and his Bunch of Bullshitters.
They were young. Not one member was past thirty, and each one of those sons of bitches was reed-thin like a consumption victim in his last throes of life. They all wore Montana-peaked Stetsons and drooping gun belts like unemployed cow-boys, save Billy who crowned himself with a derby, and wore his gun high in a belt of rare black leather. Everyone was filthy though and everyone wore coats and scarves and mittens and cigarettes between their lips.
4. On Morality and Plans
"Now look at this old bastard here!" Billy said, flashing the three bottom black teeth he got his moniker from. Billy was a killer, and a good one, mainly because he remained an innocent. He did not have a better side that told him of the Good Book and morals, therefore corrupting him with doubt and guilt. He gave no thought to the needs of others, unless he was pleasuring a woman, and that was really just a reflection of himself in their rippling ponds.
"How you doin' Fenn?"
Fenn stared forward, barely acknowledging Billy as he snapped his watch closed and sipped some from his now lukewarm beer.
"You're forty-three minutes late."
Billy smiled, "Now that's just---"
"That's just goddamned rude is what it is."
The old bastard turned his gaze to Billy's face, and that young son of bitch saw the faintest white dot in Fenn's squinting black eyes all pouring over with shriveled skin and Billy felt as if he were twelve years old again staring at his pa when he was on one of his violent drunks. He didn't want to look soft in front of his Bullshitters but he didn't have time to put on a front because Fenn spoke again.
"Sit down."
Billy sat.
"You tell me what we're doing."
"Well…uh…y'see, we've been noticing that…" Billy picked at some chipping paint on the table.
"Stop that."
"Uh…Yessir."
"Keep talking."
"Well, we…uh…got word that the Standard Mill ships its gold ore by wagon out to Carson City by way of Aurora."
"Yeah."
"Well, we was thinkin' on robbin' it with your help."
“Yeah.”
“What do you think?”
"Do you got a plan worked out or are you just gonna ride at the thing with pistols a-blazing like a bunch a goddamn greasers?"
"Well shit…I wanted to work that out with you. Y'know, plan it all together."
"No. I don't do things like that. You come to me with your plan and I'll tell you what's wrong with it."
"Alright, well--"
"You know where Mono Lake is?"
"Yeah. Of course."
"You meet me there with a plan tomorrow night at ten o'clock, and don't you be a second late or you will not see me again."
"OK…uh--"
"Now get the fuck out of my face. I’m tryin to drink here."
Billy's eyes bobbed about as if he didn't know where to look. He got up and paused for a second, taking off his derby hat and caressing the brim.
"Um…"
Fenn didn't acknowledge him. He just kept sipping at his warm beer, pretending like it was the best he ever tasted.
Billy turned around to his Bullshitters who were all standing there blank and quiet and brown as a tintype.
"Well, get the hell out!" he said and waved his arms. They all poured out of the batwing doors so fast that one broke off from its hinges and fell on the steps where it stayed for 3 years.
5. Jimmy Barbecue and the Pimp Stick
Outside in the purple air, a man was selling iced melon from a cart, clanging a bell and shouting.
“We got cantee-lopes! Watee-melons! All kinds of fruit for ye!”
And in his anger, Billy snatched the bell from the man’s hand and threw it at a cat that was batting the droopy ears of a sleeping drunkard. Billy turned to Jimmy Barbecue, his second in command, and balled his fist into his hand.
"That old bastard tries to muscle me around. Well goddamn him. If we didn't need that old fart for this thing I'd like a chance at him. I'd whup that geezered asshole in a fight any goddamn time, I'll tell you that much."
His breath was thick in the cold and every word could be seen floating into the air and disintegrating.
Jimmy just looked at him. Billy grimaced.
"What?"
"I didn't say nothing."
"Roll me a pimp stick you son of bitch."
Jimmy did and Billy smoked it and blew rings and thought.
6. The Color of Her Hair
Fenn stayed seated at the table sipping his beer with his crooked fingers all curled and jittering around the handle of his mug. A whore by the name of Coon-Tailed Alice sauntered over to the table and pulled up a chair and her long red hair was like the Arizona plains that Fenn one time lived on and her green eyes were glowing like a wolf's and there was a constellation of freckles all across the back of her neck. He liked those things, but mostly he liked her big freckly tits and her faded pink nipples and the pall of red hair on her cunny. He once fucked a different redheaded whore but the hair on her cunny was more of a brown color.
Alice was Fenn's favorite whore, naturally, but he was certainly not her favorite customer. He wasn't as bad as some of the miners; that was true. With their cold-shriveled peckers and their malnourished bodies where the sweat curled around each protruding rib. And of course their long, lice-infested beards and rotted-out teeth and their propensity for farting and general lack of Victorian manners.
Fenn wasn't a bad john, but he was nothing special and the experience was never more than tolerable. He wasn't into romantic touching though, and she appreciated that. That kind of thing made her feel sick inside. The more straightforward one was about their perversities the more pure the enterprise became. Fenn just wanted a warm place for his pecker and to maybe bury his face in some tits or a big, snow-white ass.
She put her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand.
"Are you gonna ask me for a dance or not?" she said.
Fenn's mustache bent sideways and perhaps there was a smile hiding beneath it.
"I'll ask you for something else."
"And I'll ask you for something in return."
"And I'll give it to you right now."
He threw some coins on the table and Alice went to counting them.
"This'll get you 15 minutes," she said.
"I'll be finished in half that."
"I bet you will."
"Does that mean I get a discount?"
"Absolutely not."
"Well, I guess we can spend the rest of the time jawing like we are now."
"In that case, the time starts now."
"In that case, lets get the fuck upstairs. Er…pardon my tongue."
"No need for apologies, because I concur. Let's get the fuck upstairs."
