The wind freshened. I smelled the coming rain. To the west, thunderclouds began to pile up. The crops needed rain, but always the fear was hail, big hail that would smash and beat the crops into the ground.
Wind whistled down the wide, rutted road that served as the town’s main street. A cloud of dust whirled in the air, clattering tiny specs of dirt and rock against the large windows of the weathered store fronts that lined the street. I closed my eyes and tucked my head under my arm. My sweater sleeve made a good air filter and protected my face. The ESSO service station sat a few feet ahead to my left. I felt my way along until I reached the alcove next to the two gas pumps.
Safely out of the wind, I lowered my arm and squinted across the street. That’s when I saw him. Like a creature from the mists he appeared, statue-like and staring straight ahead, sitting on the single front step leading to the Post Office.
A faded, green half-ton rattled up the street and pulled into the service station. It was my friend, Cuddow—real name Norbert but mostly we used nicknames—dropping off his father’s 1939 Fargo for some motor work. Cuddow was sixteen, three years older than me, but he treated me equal.
“Jeez, ju see that?” I asked, stepping from the alcove.
“What?” Cuddow slammed the front door of the half-ton. It didn’t close. He slammed it again. It closed.
“That scary old fart across the street; didn’t even blink when that giant cloud of dust blew past, sat here like nuthin happened..”
Cuddow glanced over his shoulder. “Who, old Tex? He eats that stuff for breakfast.”
“Who the hell is old Tex?”
Up until now all the critical things in life such as kissing girls, drinking booze, flipping through girlie magazines in the back shed, and smoking everything from corn silk in homemade pipes to cigarettes stolen from his old man’s stash, I had learned from Cuddow. Old Tex hadn’t been one of them. That was about to change. Cuddow peered down through his thick glasses with their reddish brown plastic frames about the same color as the million freckles splattered across his face. I sucked in a deep breath of anticipation.
“Tex isn’t his real name, you know.”
“Whaddya mean?” Something in the way he said it made my heart skip a beat. This was going to be big.
“They call him Tex because he used to be a Texas Ranger.”
“Bullshit!”
He looked at me real hurt like. “I mean, you’re kidding me, ain’t cha?”
“Go ask Tin Chin.”
Tin Chin, otherwise known as William McAllister, owned McAllister’s Grocery and Dry Goods store, one of the two stores in town. Because his chin receded just below the mouth and ran into his neck, we’d started off calling him Thin Chin. Somewhere along the way it ended up being Tin Chin.
“No, I believe ya. But, Jesus, man, a Texas Ranger, in this shit hole?”
We started walking toward Tin Chin’s place.
“You know why he’s here?”
I shook my head no. A minute ago I didn’t even know who Tex was, but I knew it wasn’t really a question; it was Cuddow’s way of feeding me a bit at a time, keeping the suspense going.
“He’s huntin’ the bastard that raped his daughter. Word is he’s gunna kill the son-of-a-bitch.” Cuddow sounded
“Tex is Irene Richey’s father?”
No one in town was supposed to know about the rape, but there weren’t many secrets in small towns.
Cuddow nodded. We pushed through Tin Chin’s front door.
“Boys.” Tin Chin greeted us. No one else was in the store.
“Hello, Mr. McAllister,” Cuddow said.
“Hello,” I said. I didn’t look square at Tin Chine because I didn’t like him much. Once, when I was ten, he’d chased one of my friends and me out of his store with a broom.
“You see my new car?”
“That yours?” Cuddow asked in a suck up of sort of way. Cuddow worked part-time for Tin Chin so he had to suck up. “The new Studebaker? Nice.”
“Just got her. Picked her up from LO this morning. Commander; biggest one there is.”
L.O. was the local dealer; a lot of people, my old man included, thought he was a crook. If that were true, in my opinion, L.O. and Tin Chin deserved each other. Tin Chin was a blow hard. That’s another reason I didn’t like him much. Besides, we weren’t there to find out about his dumb car.
“’52?” Cuddow asked.
Tin Chin recoiled like he’d been slapped. “You kiddin’ me? She’s a ‘53 all the way.”
“Wow,” Cuddow said. Who cares, I thought.
“Wanna go for a ride?”
“Can’t right now. Maybe tomorrow.”
Maybe never, I thought.
“Actually, we wanted to ask you a question about old Tex.”
Tin Chin looked askance. I figured he was pissed because we wouldn’t go for a ride in his new Stupid Baker. “Whaddya want to know?” He twirled a piece of store string between his fingers. His phony smile had disappeared. He seemed cautious.
“You know Hal Poole? He tried to tell us old Tex used to be a Texas Ranger; he said that’s why everyone calls him Tex.”
Tin Chin broke the string. “That Poole’s a no good son-of-a-bitch half-breed. You boys have no business hanging around with his kind.”
“Well, we weren’t actually with him,” Cuddow said. “We were at the hotel when he staggered out of the bar; we overheard him talkin’ to someone else is all.”
I looked down to see if I was knee-deep in all the bullshit Cuddow was flinging around.
“Well, he used to be a Texas Ranger,” Tin Chin said, stroking his non-existent chin and staring out through the big window at the front of his store. “For nearly forty years, as I understand it. Hung up his badge in ’35 and moved to a ranch over there in Montana outside one of them big cities, Billings maybe. I never heard his real name.”
“What’s he doing up here?” Cuddow gave me a wink that Tin Chin couldn’t see.
For some reason Tin Chin looked squarely at me and said, “Not real sure. Lots of rumors circo…circo…uh, goin around.”
Tin Chin couldn’t say certain words. I guessed circulating was one of them. And I could tell he knew about old Tex, but wasn’t going to tell us because he figured I was too young to hear about rape. That’s why he’d looked at me: To figure out if I was old enough. Don’t matter you old blowhard cuz I know anyway.
Tin Chin returned his gaze to the window; Cuddow and I also. Tex continued to sit and stare.
“He’s like that for hours,” Tin Chin said. “Crazy old bastard.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Cuddow said, though I suspected he didn’t agree. I suspected he thought of Tex as a real live Western hero, like
A customer came in and asked about some binder twine. Cuddow and I took advantage of the distraction to beat it the hell out of Tin Chin’s store. I turned to the right. Cuddow started across the street toward old Tex.
“Where the hell ya goin?”
“C’mon,” he said.
He was more than half-way across the street by the time I caught up.
“Are you nuts?”
Cuddow kept walking right up until he was a foot in front of old Tex.
“Mr. Walker,” Cuddow said by way of greeting.
How’d he know his name and how come it wasn’t Richey, same as his daughter’s?
Old Tex looked up. “Norbert,” he said, flicking two fingers from the brim of his genuine cowboy hat.
I was still mostly standing behind Cuddow, who stepped aside and said, “This here’s my friend, Stubbs.”
“Stubbs,” Tex said, again touching two fingers to his genuine cowboy hat.
“Blmadkfjlakmdl,” I muttered, my eyes frozen to his weather-scarred face, or rather the part of it that was missing. His nose. He had a copper nose tied to his head with a piece of string.
Tex turned his attention back to Cuddow, apparently convinced I was retarded. The sun glanced off Tex’s copper nose and hit me in the eyes. I squinted and lowered my head. That’s when I saw the leather thong around his calf. Then his duster fell open as he reached in and pulled out a tobacco plug. That’s when I saw the holster strapped to his leg and the pearl handle of his six-shooter. A tingling ran up and down my spine. I tried to look away, but my eyes were frozen on his hip.
Another gust of wind chose that precise moment to hit and forced me to shield my face and close my eyes. As I stood waiting for it to blow past, my right arm went strangely numb as though it sensed old Tex on the move. He didn’t brush against me; I don’t know what it was, more like something cool, maybe like a ghost, and I got a weird metallic taste in my mouth. I tried to peek but all I could see was a cloud of brown, even Cuddow had temporarily disappeared.
Then, right behind me, a single gunshot sounded. I whipped around, about to pee my pants. The cloud of dust began to dissipate. The guy lying in the street had shit himself and blood darkened the right shoulder of his white tee. He cried out as he struggled to get free, but was handcuffed to the bumper of the Postmaster’s Ford pickup.
From a distance, a siren’s wail blew in on the wind. Cab Barker, the postmaster stuck his head out of the post office door. “You boys don’t want to be here when the State Troopers arrive,” he said. “Besides, I’m sure you didn’t see anything?”
“No,” we both said, and high-tailed it in the opposite direction from the sound of the approaching siren. We didn’t need a kick in the ass to know we weren’t wanted.
The sky grew a purple black, lighting flashed followed by an enormous crash of thunder, and the rain came down in buckets. We ducked into Frenchy’s, a crappy coffee shop on the corner where we could see the cops, but they couldn’t see us.
“Where the hell did old Tex go?” I wanted to know. “And why didn’t you tell me about his friggin’ nose and six-shooter? All I seen was his copper nose and big friggin six-shooter.”
Cuddow looked at me like I’d never seen him look before. “I don’t believe we seen old Tex today,” he said, gripping my shoulder hard.
It started to hurt. I tried to pull away.
“In fact,” he added, “I don’t believe we seen old Tex, ever.”
The screen door at the back of Frenchy’s slammed in the wind. I turned to look. Though dark as night, I caught a glimpse of a shadow moving through the sheeting rain. As the shadow reached the thick growth of trees across the alley, a bolt of lightning struck nearby, momentarily turning night to day. The shadow had a copper nose.
“No,” I said, looking straight at Cuddow, “I ain’t never seen him, that’s for sure.”
