He was cool as well water about the whole thing. The hallway was in a clamor now and there was unholy pounding on the door. I handed over the money I’d scooped up and he stuck it in his pocket. All except for one silver dollar—which he held up for me to look at. “For your fine services, ma’am,” he said, and he bounced it off my tit and laughed.
Then he unlocks the door and throws it open wide. He points to me still hunkered on the floor in the altogether and says to the jabbering men crowded in the hallway, “Lookee here, boys!” And while all those stupid sons of bitches just stand there gawking at my nakedness, he pushes through them and scoots off down the stairs and gets himself long gone before the sheriff arrives.
The sheriff didn’t believe the kid’s name was Jeb Bishop any more than I did, but he was plenty mad about the easy way he’d made off, and he took much of his displeasure out on me. Said he didn’t much care for “city trash” grifting in his nice little town and threatened to lock me up for a good long time for prostitution and public lasciviousness. I had to French him in the jail house twice before he settled on letting me pay for Eddie Joe’s coffin and the undertaker’s fee, plus what he called “administrative expenses”—all of which just happened to total the exact amount of money I had on me. He didn’t mention the money he’d taken off Eddie Joe’s dead body and naturally I didn’t either. He ran me out with a warning never to show my face in Limestone County again if I knew what was good for me.
I didn’t work independent for very long after that. I got cheated too often and beat up too much. I finally went to work in a house in Galveston. I was twenty-two years old and looked damn near twice that.
A few years after the bad business in Kosse, I read about that boy in the Galveston newspaper. He was in jail in Austin, waiting trial for murder and claiming it was self-defense. In a big long interview with a reporter, he told about other times he’d had to kill somebody in self-defense, and one of those he mentioned was a fellow in Limestone County who’d tried to rob him in a hotel room at gunpoint after he’d been lured in there by a pretty female accomplice. That was how I found out Eddie Joe had been killed by none other than John Wesley Hardin.
Naturally I showed the newspaper to the other girls and bragged about how it was me and Eddie Joe who tried that badger on Hardin. And do you know that none of them believed me? Not a one. Laughed at me and called me a cheap-assed liar. Goddamn lousy whores.
The six months cousin Wes spent hiding out on our farm was probably the most peaceful time of his life. Since the start of his troubles with the law, I mean. It was surely an exciting time for us, though—“us” meaning me and my brothers Aaron and Joey. What was mostly so exciting about it was the times we all spent sporting at Mrs. Miller’s or Kate Vine’s over in Brenham, the closest town. It was Wes who introduced us to the pleasures of such establishments. Every Saturday—and on any day it rained or was too wet to work the fields—we’d all four ride into Brenham and have a high time at one or the other of those two fine places.
Of course none of us—I mean me and my brothers—ever had the money to pay for such sporting. It was always Wes treating us to the girls. The first thing he’d do when we got into town was go straight to the gaming tables and win enough to pay for all four of us at Kate’s or Mrs. Miller’s. I thought he could of been a rich man if he’d gambled for a living instead of just doing it for sporting money, but he said doing it for a living would take most of the fun out of it.
It was in Brenham that he met Phil Coe, the fanciest-dressing, fanciest-talking gambling man I ever knew. He was a big fella with a close beard. He carried a gold-headed walking stick and fastened his necktie with a diamond pin. His pistola was pearl-handled and he wore it in a holster under his arm. They said he was awful good with that gun, but I don’t know, I never did see him shoot. He sure saw how Wes could shoot, though—everybody in town did—because the first time we all went into Brenham together, Wes got into a contest with some of the local deadeyes and beat them all so bad they wouldn’t none of them shoot against him again. He finished up the show by shooting the windcock on the church steeple at the end of the street. He started it spinning with the first shot and kept it spinning with the next five. The fellas watching clapped and whistled like they were at a hoochie show. Reverend Hart came stomping over, all red-faced and mad enough to spit nails, but he calmed down quick when Wes gave him a twenty-dollar donation toward his good work for the Lord.
Later on when Coe and Wes got to be friends, Wes challenged him to a friendly shooting match, but Coe backed off. I was standing at the bar with them when he told Wes, “I never discharge my firearm except when compelled by serious circumstance, and the only truly serious circumstance is the defense of one’s own life.” That’s how he talked. But that was horseshit about never pulling his gun except to defend himself. He knew damn well he couldn’t outshoot Wes, and he didn’t want to get shown up in public, that’s all.
He couldn’t beat Wes at the gaming tables, either—not near as often as Wes beat him, anyway. But he was a genuine gambler, Phil Coe was, so he never got riled about losing. He’d just make a joke and play on and wait for the cards to start coming his way again, which they usually did once Wes dropped out of the game with his winnings and we headed for the sporting house.
It was Phil Coe who gave Wes the nickname “Little Seven-up,” on account of Wes’s constant good luck with that game. Pretty soon everybody in the saloons was calling him by it. One time Joey called him that in the house and Ma heard him and wanted to know what it meant. She knew plenty, but it was our good fortune she didn’t know the names of all the games of chance. That quick-thinker Wes told her it was a sort of ice cream soda he’d gotten so fond of that the fellers in town had started calling him by that name. Ma thought that was real fine. In fact, she liked the name so much she took up calling him by it. One night at supper Pa heard her use it, and he gave us a what-the-hell look. Ma caught it and explained to him about the nickname. “Oh, yes,” Pa said, “I believe I’ve cut my thirst with that particular soda a time or two myself.” When Ma went to the stove to fetch the stewpot, he gave us a wink behind her back. He’d been a hellion himself before he married Ma and she put the bridle on him.
One last thing about Phil Coe. I didn’t much care for his airs and fancy talk and I’ve said so, but he did become a true friend to Wes, so that made him all right with me and my brothers. We were sincerely sorry a few years later when we heard he’d got himself killed up in Abilene by none other than Wild Bill.
I don’t mean to give the idea it was all high times in town while Wes was living with us, because of course it wasn’t. Mostly it was the same as before he came and after he went away again. What we mainly did was work. Pa made a deal with him that gave Wes a share of the crops he helped us bring in. When it came to axing timber, grubbing stumps, clearing rocks, plowing fields, hoeing cotton, splitting rails, putting up fences—all the kinds of work that keeps you at it from sunup to sundown on a farm—Wes matched our own sweat drop for drop. You might not have thought it to look at him when he was duded up in his black suit, but he was powerful strong. In his clothes he usually looked like a bean pole holding up a hat, but when he took his shirt off to swing an ax he looked like he was made of ropes and trace chains. There wasn’t a thing on his bones but long hard muscle.