Doubtful Opera House. And he’d had some kind of get-together in there, with all the town’s bigwigs having a mint julep on stage. I wasn’t invited, not being a bigwig.
I don’t read so good, but I made out what was on them broadsheets. There was a lot of gorgeous women in that show, all dressed up in feathers. At least that’s what the pictures looked like. That would sure draw a crowd in woman-starved Puma County, where there were about ten men for every gal, and the gals were all married. This outfit on its way to Doubtful was called the Gildersleeve Variety Company, run by Madame Magenta Gildersleeve, of the Slovakian Royal Ballet. There would be twenty beauties, along with the well-known comedian and tap dancer Horace Van Der Platz, the maestro of the top hat, cane, and white spats. And there would be a breathtaking tableau, featuring the famed women in the paintings of Rubens, displayed exactly as they appeared in his art.
I didn’t know what a tableau was, but anything that displayed famous women would be worth a gander. I wondered if my badge would let me in free. Down there in the fine print it said the company traveled in thirty-six coaches, and had been the sensation of Prague, London, Cheyenne, Deadwood, and Denver.
Well, I had to hand it to that Ralston. He was going to fill his opera house, and maybe I’d even see this bevy of beauties a second time. Puma County was shy of beauties, although if Belle, who ran the boardinghouse, would lose a little flesh, she might qualify on a night when the light wasn’t too bright.
Then one fine day I spotted Ike Berg meandering along our main drag. He was the sheriff over in Medicine Bow County, and I didn’t need any help figuring out what he was doing in Doubtful. The super visors were looking him over for my job. But there he was, dressed in his usual black suit and starched white shirt and string tie. He was the skinniest man I’d ever seen, almost skeletal, and his face was nothing but parchment over skull. He didn’t have no flesh on him, just that parchment covering bone. But he was reputed to be as good as they ever got with his Peacemaker Colt. And there he was, grinning at me as we approached each other in front of the smithy.
“I guess I know what you’re here for, Ice,” I said. No one called him Ike. He was Ice Berg to the world.
“I hear you got a crime wave,” Ice Berg said.
“Stickup man cleaned my purse,” I said.
“Town fathers aren’t happy with it. They’re embarrassed. The sheriff got himself robbed.”
Berg smiled, baring even, white teeth. I wonder whether teeth like that came with skinny.
“That was careless of you.”
“You applying for my job?”
“The town’s foremost citizens sent for me, Pickens. I’m here to oblige them.”
He smiled again, like he knew things I didn’t know.
“They offering you the job?”
“We’re dickering about pay. I’m asking eighty a month and they won’t budge from seventy-five.”
“Seventy-five! I earn forty.”
“We’re usually worth what we’re paid, Pickens.”
His bony hand was actually hovering just over his piece, which sure made me wonder. Did he think I’d shoot him? Or was he just precautionary by nature? Shooting wouldn’t be a bad idea, but my ma always said, don’t shoot anyone unless it’s a good idea.
He was standing there in the sunlight, chewing a toothpick, looking kind of smirky, and I thought that shooting him might improve the peace on Main Street. But I didn’t, even though I knew I was faster than he’d ever be.
“When’ll you hear?” I asked, since it bore on my future.
“They said there’s a mess of petty crooks heading for town, theater riffraff, and they’re going to see which of us keeps the lid on.”
“You mean you’re a lawman around here for a while?”
“Unofficially.”
“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.”
