J.A. Johnstone - The Loner - Crossfire

“I think I got the badge, Berg. No one’s took it from me yet.”

Berg, he just smiled and chewed on that toothpick.

I had to admit Berg would be a good man to have around if things got tough again. He’d come to Medicine City when it was a lawless mining camp, infested with every sort of crook and con man and bitch that ever set out to skin miners out of their metal. They all underestimated Ice Berg because he was so skinny, almost frail-looking. But he was quick and ruthless, and he slowly and almost secretly began locking up the worst, banging heads together, and causing a few funerals.

I’d done nothing like that, so maybe that’s why I didn’t get any more than some ranch cowboy was getting, but I got to live in town. But here he was, and I knew that Reggie Thimble and Ziggie Camp were studying on him. I don’t think he weighed ninety pounds, but a lot of lawman came in that skinny package.

And here he was, my rival. I felt kind of low about that. I’d always thought Ice Berg was as good as they get, and he had always been sort of an idol of mine. Time or two, I’d found myself wishing I could be good as him. But here he was, walking the streets of my town like he already owned it. I sure had mixed feelings about that.

“You know anything about this variety show, Cotton?” he asked.

“I’ll make a deal with you. You don’t call me Cotton and I won’t call you Ice.”

“But I like my name. You don’t like yours?”

“It got hung on my by my ma and pa, and I’ve always been a little tetched since they named me that. I’ve thought maybe I should get my name changed to Fat. Like Fat Pickens.”

“Just call me Iceberg,” he said. “It makes barflies shiver.”

“I never seed a variety show in my life, but Ralston, he owns the joint, says there’s gonna be pretty girls in it. To my mind, any girl’s pretty. And there’s so few women around that I can’t tell pretty from plain.”

“I don’t like women, Iceberg said. “I can live without ’em.”

“Can’t get born without ’em,” I said.

“Pickens, ain’t that real bright,” he said. He was smirking at me.

“Guess I’ll see you around,” I said.

“Maybe not,” he replied.

He drifted off, studying our metropolis like it was dead meat.

My ritual is to patrol Doubtful at odd hours, never on a set schedule, because that’s a good way to keep the peace. So that’s what I did next. I started down Main Street, but I only got as far as the Puma County Merchant Bank before Hubert Sanders waved at me from his front stoop. He was the banker. He’d started it up two years earlier because Doubtful needed a bank, and now he operated with one teller and one bookkeeper, and his bank was thriving along with Doubtful. Hubert was a doleful man and his wife was even more doleful. They both wore wire-rimmed spectacles and their lips looked like they had just eaten pickles. They had gotten in a preacher and started up a Methodist Church, the first house of worship in Doubtful, which I suppose I should have appreciated because it meant Doubtful was getting more civilized and less wild, but somehow, whenever I looked at that whitewashed wooden church I had an itch to get onto Critter and ride until I was about five counties away.

But there was Sanders, wiggling his skinny finger at me, as if he owned the plantation. I walked up the two stone steps into the red brick bank, eyed Willis the teller and Wally the bookkeeper with the green eyeshade and sleeve garters, and headed through a gate to the corner where Sanders had his desk and where he watched the world go by from his big glass window.

“Have a seat, Sheriff. I’ve been meaning to talk to you for some while now, he said, waving me to a hard oak chair. That was how Sanders operated. The harder the chair, the faster his visitors would get through their business and retreat before their tailbone howled at them.

“Perdition is arriving in Doubtful,” he said. “Ruin. Sodom and Gomorrah. We’ll all be fleeced.”

“Ralston?” I said.

“Of course, Ralston. Do you know how these traveling companies work? They come into a small town like ours, run a few shows, clean out every spare dime the town has, and then head to the next town that is foolish enough to let them in.” He eyed me with those owlish eyes. “The Ralston is a poverty machine. It is going to ruin our good ranchers and merchants. It is going to cause wealth to flee. It will empty my bank. My depositors will withdraw their funds and squander their cash on those theater hussies and vixens and worse. I tell you, Sheriff, this is a catastrophe in the making. And it gets worse. There never was a moral person treading the boards of a theater stage. We will have a Gomorrah here. There’ll be no one attending church, and no one putting money in the collection plate. The sulfurous smell of hades will waft through Doubtful, stinking up our fair, clean, lawful city.”

I was getting the drift, so I just nodded.

“It all depends on you, Cotton Pickens. It’ll be up to you to rescue Doubtful from sin and poverty and madness. It’ll be up to you not only to enforce the law in all respects, but to enforce the moral law. If those hussies on that stage bare anything more than an ankle, arrest them for violating public decency. If they dance, pinch them. Good people don’t dance. It’s against everything that proper people stand for.”

“I just enforce the law, such as the legislature gives us,” I said. “I got a book of it that I study sometimes.”

“You’re going to do more than that, Pickens. I’ll insist on it. If you don’t do what’s required, I’ll see about finding a man who will. You are going to find the means to shut down Ralston. That fellow is the devil incarnate. I didn’t realize at first what he was up to, building that sin palace right on the main street of Doubtful. He didn’t borrow a cent from me, and I don’t know where his cash came from, but find out. It’s probably tainted money.”

He stared straight at me through those wire-rimmed spectacles. “Shut him down. You’ll find reasons enough. A dozen reasons a night. Shut down any company that comes in. Shut them down for any reason you can think of. Arrest them. Charge them. Tell them to get out of town or they’ll face worse.”

So that was where Sanders was heading.

Me, I was feeling some heat from all sides. Ralston as much as said he’d welcome an open town, so people could have some fun. The supervisors were convinced a crime wave was cranking up. And now Sanders wanted me to shut the place down before it even got feet under it and started running. And there were a few vultures out there, or at least one anyway, looking to snatch my badge from me.

It sure was getting interesting.

“As long as they’re lawful, I don’t have any way to shut ’em down,” I said.

“You’ll find a way. Or a new sheriff will.”

“Here’s what you do, sir,” I said. “You tell the supervisors what laws you want, and if they enact them, then I’ll enforce them. It’s that simple. You want some new laws, you go get the elected officials to put them on the books. Meanwhile, I’ll do my best to keep this town as peaceful as I know how.”

Sanders arose abruptly. “You are dismissed,” he said.

So I was dismissed. I headed out into the sunlight and took a good look at them green-clad mountains off to the west, poking up into a bright blue heaven.

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Copyright © 2011 J. A. Johnstone

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