Epilogue
A little more than three months later, a pair of cold-eyed cowboys were
sitting on adjoining barstools in a saloon in Tombstone, Arizona. The taller of
the two, dressed all in black, elbowed his shifty-eyed companion.
"The one in the yaller dress ain't half bad lookin', Ern. For a whore."
His weasel-faced companion nodded gloomily and called out, "Hey, honey,
bring that damn bottle back over here."
The buxom strawberry-blonde barmaid felt four hungry eyes devouring her
breasts as she approached them, bottle in hand, with a careless hip-swinging
gait. As she neared their end of the horseshoe bar, she passed by a grizzled
old miner who was seated next to them, poring over a yellowing newspaper. The
blonde gave the taller of the two strangers a coy smile, her pink tongue
moistening her full lips.
"How you fellers doin' tonight? she asked as she refilled their shot
glasses. She leaned forward a little, letting them get a good look down her
low-cut dress. It had been a slow night and she hadn't made enough in tips to
buy dinner. Maybe if she gave them a free look, she reasoned, she could turn a
trick later and make some dough.
The tall one wasn't bad-looking, she thought, if you liked your men on the
rugged side. The little one with the misshapen face was a homely little
bastard, though. And he didn't smell much better than he looked.
Jack Slocum could feel his cock swell as he drank in the sight of the
blonde's pink breast-flesh. Aside from an unlucky young Apache maiden whom
they'd caught bathing alone in the hills north of Nogales, neither he nor Ernie
had had a woman since the morning they'd left Piedras Negras. The woman pouring
his drink had some nice tits, and she didn't seem to mind showing them off.
The blonde served the twosome and turned to take care of a customer at the
other end of the bar, giving her butt a cute little twitch as she did so.
"Nice ass," Ernie offered. "But she's a bit old for my taste, Jackson.
You know I like 'em young. Besides that, I'm still as broke as a greenhorn with
three aces facing a goddam straight!" he cursed, loud enough for the miners at
the other end of the bar to hear.
"Aw, she ain't that old, Ern, maybe 30 is all. You ain't no schoolkid
yerself anymore either. And she's got good tits. Wouldn't mind gettin' a hold
of them babies, and givin' 'em a good squeeze. For starters," Jack grunted.
The old miner on Jack's right finished the last of his drink. "Evenin',
Lucy," he called to the blonde at the other end of the bar, as he laid the
crumpled-up paper on top of the bar. "See you tomorrow night."
"OK, Barney," the blonde said. And she gave Jack a quick wink before
turning back to the customers at the other end of the bar.
Slocum glanced idly at the paper the old miner had left. And then suddenly
something caught his eye, and he snatched the paper up and began to study it
closely.
"Jack, you ain't gonna find yer goddam picture in there," Ernie snorted.
"You'd have better luck in a Texas Post Office!"
"Shut up, asshole. Read this."
Ernie had gotten kicked out of school in the third grade for skinning the
schoolmarm's kitten after she'd yelled at him. And he'd never gone back.
Reading wasn't exactly his strong suit, as Jack knew perfectly well.
"This damn eye," Ernie alibied, fingering the left side of his face, still
a bit discolored from doing battle with Carlos's bottle, "still hurts when I
read, Jack. Why don't you read it to me, buddy?"
And Jack began to read aloud from the Tombstone Epitaph....
The Miracle of Piedras Negras
This newspaperman has run into some strange stories since he came west
after the war, but none as strange as this one. They say it's as big a story
down Mexico way, as the Clanton shoot-out at the OK Corral was around this neck
of the woods a few years back.
Seems like there's this little church down in Sonora, in a one-horse
village called Piedras Negras, not too far from Magdalena, on the main road
leading south from Nogales. And the folks in those parts are saying that a
miracle took place there last fall.
Apparently last Halloween night, a couple of American roughnecks passing
through Piedras Negras attacked a young woman in a little saloon across the
street from a deserted church.
The woman, who apparently was beaten quite badly, claims that her
assailants ...
"Assailants?" Jack struggled with the unfamiliar word. "What the hell is an
assailant?"
Ernie shrugged. But the story Jack was reading had gotten his attention.
For the first time since he'd come into the saloon his eyes weren't on the
blonde's over-ripe figure. He peered at the tiny print over Jack's shoulder,
even though the inky symbols on the week-old newspaper meant nothing to him.
... her assailants were frightened away by the tolling of the chimes of a
nearby church. A church -- here's where it starts to get interesting, folks --
that the locals swear no one had been inside of for nearly a year.
Jack and Ernie exchanged puzzled glances.
The townspeople down in Piedras Negras are convinced that the spirits of
"Los Angelitos" - the little children buried in the nearby cemetery - somehow
came to the rescue of the victim of the attack. That the Angelitos somehow got
the bells in the church-tower to ring, and frightened off the Yankee
desperados.
So grateful was the young woman, one Teresa Martinez, for her deliverance,
that the next morning she gave Father Eusebio, the local padre, a considerable
sum of money. It turns out some luckless soul had lost his wallet in Teresa's
little tavern not long before, and she had just found it a night or two earlier,
stuffed with cash. And so, the good padre has been able to re-open the
abandoned church, to the delight of the local populace.
Ernie angrily emptied his glass and flung it across the room, just missing
a drunk who had fallen forward across a table near the swinging doors of the
saloon. "That bitch. That fucking bitch!" Ernie fumed. "I knew she had the
money, Jack! I knew it! If you had just let me work on her for another few
seconds ... Fuck!!!"
"Hey, quit throwing things down there, Shorty! Them glasses don't grow on
trees, you know."
Ernie gave the barmaid a dirty look. "Ah, don't git your tits in an
uproar, blondie," he muttered under his breath.
'And I woulda, too, Jack," Ernie continued, in a voice low enough that only
Jack could hear, "if you hadn't a stopped me. You and yer goddam jinxes! Fuck!
She damn sure woulda talked if I'd 'a run that hot knife across those trussed-up
tits a coupla times!"
Jack struggled in vain to suppress a toothy smile. "Yeah, Ern. You mighta
got yer fifty bucks. And you mighta got a rope around yer neck too."
"Yeah, but I been fuckin' broke ever since, Jack. That no-good thieving
Mexican whore! I shoulda twisted her tits off when I had the chance!"
Jack smirked again. "Tell you what, partner." The man in black reached
into a pocket and pulled out a shiny new silver dollar. "I feel kinda bad about
yer being broke and all. Take this," he offered Ernie the dollar, "and have
yerself a good time with Lucy, there, when she goes off duty." Jack gestured
toward the full-breasted blonde barmaid. "I'm gonna ride back to the cabin and
work on that damn roof before we get us another cloudburst."
Jack rose and slapped his weasel-faced partner on the back. "And stop yer
damn pissin' and moanin' about that money you left in Me-ji-co. Who knows,"
Jack's sly smile widened into a broad grin, "if you wrote that padre a letter,
they might even name that church San Ernesto in your honor!"
Jack was still chuckling to himself as he stepped outside and mounted
Cyclone. Ernie, meanwhile, flipped the silver dollar over and over in his
fingers, while he undressed Lucy's ripe body with his eyes.
Ernie tapped the hard edge of the silver dollar twice on the bar. Lucy
turned toward him, and saw the shiny silver dollar glinting in his hand. She
considered for a moment, and then walked toward him, smiling this time, her eyes
on the dollar, not on Ernie.
"Hey, handsome," she addressed the weasel-faced little man. 'You doin'
anything later? I'll be gettin' off in a while."
Ernie Gibbs returned Lucy's insincere smile with one of his own. He held
the silver coin up and turned it slowly so that the light from the tawdry
overhead chandelier played on its shiny surface. He noticed that Lucy's greedy
eyes never left it. "Yeah, maybe we can get together, then, Doll, and have us a
little fun."
While Lucy stared, mesmerized by the shiny dollar, Ernie the Weasel's
tongue swept over his dry lips as he eyeballed the voluptuous breasts that
spilled out of the bodice of her garish yellow dress.
"Hey, hon, whatcha luggin' around in that big ol' knapsack?" Lucy asked.
Ernie's lower lip curled into a smile that was as cold and as hard as his
silver dollar, as he glanced down at the big blue rucksack at his feet. Because
before the night was out, he reckoned, a certain big-breasted barmaid was gonna
regret having called him "Shorty".
