IN THE YEAR OF MY REVOLUTION
By James Welsh
Copyright 2015 James Welsh
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Oh le bon temps où étions si malheureux.
Alexandre Dumas
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
James Joyce
Chapter 1
Burlington, Iowa
December 1892
“No, no, take it back, please. I said I wanted water, not coffee.”
“But that is water.”
The man swirled the drink in the sweaty glass, looking curiously at the hurricane of grit swirling dizzy in the cup. “This is water? Are you sure it’s not coffee?”
The waitress shrugged. “Whatever’s in there gives the water taste. Clear water can’t do that.”
The man, impressed that the waitress would shamelessly try to sell him muddy water, laughed. “Well, when you put it like that…”
“Hunter! Hunter! Are you in this game or not?”
Ian Hunter smiled. “The game is…”
“Waiting, Mr. Hunter, it’s waiting,” one of the men at the table rumbled.
There were six men seated at the table that was meant to hold only five. There was Louis, a man who lived in Iowa only because he was wanted in all of the other states. He covered up the bald spot on his head – the monk’s crown – with a blood blister in the shape of a rifle butt. There was Barrett, who had a boulder for a head and who once held up an orphanage, because he wanted to be the first man in history to do so. There was Clive, who had sunken eyes like the graves he dug up for family heirlooms. There was Harper, with a grizzled face and hair as long and black as his clothes – he was just a priest. And then there was Elijah Cobb, a man who had the build of a champagne flute, and whose pale face clashed with his jet hair like cream splashing off black ceramic.
The men all looked each other in the eye, chasing after their own reflections in the cracked glass of the others’ irises. The card players found themselves in a hall of mirrors, their fears stretched fat and tall.
Ian was seated across from Cobb at the round table, sitting in the midnight chair of their little clock. While the other poker players were reading each other, trying to become literate in their bluffs, Ian was as bored as a god must be. He had already met enough villains like them in his life, and he knew their looks were not so much hard as much as they were stale. Ian let them know just how bored he was by letting his fingers garden his thick, sycamore beard. He knew that a person’s eyes instinctively followed hands like the footsteps of candles in the night, and he needed them distracted so that he could be free to look around the room.
The saloon they were sitting in was once the pride and shame of Burlington. Once upon a time, patrons would walk through that wide door with gold crown molding and find themselves in a world of women with dangerous legs, and not just because the ladies kept revolvers strapped to their shins with their garters. Liquor was the saloon’s blood, and it bled to the edge of death every night yet still kept living. And with men found their fortunes in card games as if the dealers were gypsies, the saloon was the first place to look when a man went missing.
But the saloon partied too hard, and it aged faster than the whiskey it sold by the barrel. Now, the doorframe was peeling, revealing that the gold was nothing more than cheap paint. Other bars sprouted up around town and stole what the saloon thought were loyal customers. But while the establishment was husked of its shine, the owner still put a sizable deposit in the bank every Friday evening. The fact that the owner’s brother was a pirate on the nearby Mississippi was just a coincidence.
One of the last veterans from the saloon’s old days was perched on Barrett’s leg like a bird on a gnarled branch. Ian remembered her name – it was Natalie – although Barrett didn’t, even though Barrett had paid her to be in love with him for the next three hours. She wore a raven mask that was once the color of coal but had since withered grey. Some feathers still streaked from the mask, but the years had plucked many of the feathers. Her top was burgundy, presumably to cover up wine spills.
She was continuously crossing and uncrossing her legs, trying to find a better position on Barrett’s rickety lap – through Natalie’s frayed, black-cat skirt, Ian spotted garters but no stockings to go with them. He wondered what guns she had holstered in the garters. He imagined a single-shot derringer, one for each leg. She had the bored confidence that comes with having two bullets but only needing one. The drink she had before sitting down with Barrett made her hands shaky, but her trigger finger was probably as steady as ever.
Across the room, the bar counter jutted out of the wall like a broken finger, the countertop bowed so much that a glass of beer could have ran away if it wanted to. There was a bison head on the counter, the mount having fallen off the rotting wall a few days before. Patches of its mane had molted off, leaving behind leathery skin that crackled in the air. What sips of light could worm their way through the dirty windows lit up the bison’s black eyes like coal on fire. Behind the counter was a large mirror that sat like a blister on the wall. On the mirror was a bullet hole surrounded by a halo of cracks. Ian noticed that the bullet hole lined up with the reflection of his face – not always the best sign.
Behind the counter was another of the saloon workers, a woman old enough to be looking back at her life rather than towards it. She had hair as black as the sea with white foam floating on top of it. She wore a cowboy hat cocked like a revolver’s hammer, ready to strike, and a black dress that once felt comfortable but now stuck to her like oil. Her skirt shrank over the years since she started working there, and now her skirt showed off the cold milk of her thighs like the dawn getting out of bed.
Ian took all of this in within just a few seconds, because he knew that he would need an escape route soon. The only thing that worked in the room besides his brain was the clock, and there was only thirty minutes left until noon struck. He caught Elijah taking glances back at the clock too, his seat creaking as he did so. With every passing minute, the creaking grew and grew like fire in dry grass.
The other players were oblivious to this. The next round came: Barrett was dealing, and so Clive was the first to bet, putting down a dollar. Then came Ian, who looked down at his hand and couldn’t make sense of the cards. Ian frowned for a few moments before turning to Louis and showing him his hand.
“Is this a good hand?” Ian asked.
“For the last time, stop showing me your cards!” Louis snapped, pushing Ian’s hand away.
“Yeah,” Clive laughed. “Stop showing him your cards and start showing me.”
The betting continued clockwise around the table, because time is money, and it wasn’t long until the first person folded. Barrett stared at his cards in one hand, while he ran his thumb over the fingers on the other, cracking the knuckles like peanut shells. Then he growled and threw the cards down on the table. He had nothing, not even a decent high card.
“Not a good hand, I guess?” Ian wondered out loud, peering over at the fallen hand. It was hard for the others to determine if he was joking or not. Harper folded soon after and so did Louis. Ian, Elijah, and Clive were the only men left standing. Neither Elijah nor Clive paid any atten
tion to Ian, rightfully believing that the rookie had no idea what he was doing. Just then, silence fell across the room like an eclipse, the only sound a soft clicking like raindrops knocking on the window. Still Elijah kept looking up at the clock, as if he was trying to find the tell in the clock’s face.
Finally, the reveal came. Clive spread his cards in a rainbow across the table – he had two sevens and two fours. Elijah shook his head as he put down a high card of an ace. Clive was about to collect his earnings, forgetting that Ian was still in the game, when Ian set down three kings.
“Does this beat your hand?” Ian asked innocently.
Clive growled something primordial and pushed the winnings over to Ian. As Ian counted through his windfall, he wondered out loud, “Say, shouldn’t three kings be called the wise men in poker? I feel like that should be a thing.”
All he got was a table of stares. Ian shrugged. “Well then, never mind. And Clive?”
“Yeah?”
“You might want to get that stone off the bottom of your boot. You sound like a Morse code operator having a seizure.”
Clive stared at him blankly and reached down to inspect the sole of his boot. Ian pretended to rub his nose to hide a little smile.
The next game of poker started. This time, the dance picked up some rhythm and Louis was steadily betting a solid amount each turn. The other players were leery, and so it wasn’t long before they folded like notes. Only Ian kept up with the pace, calling each of Louis’ bets and even raising him once or twice. A laugh jumped out of one of Barrett’s mouth, a laugh so big, it caused Natalie to jiggle on his lap. The laughter was infectious, and the other players joined in.
“What’s so funny?” Ian asked. He didn’t like it when others were laughing and he wasn’t in on the joke.
“You expecting to get lucky twice?” Barrett asked.
“I think I’m starting to get the hang of this,” Ian said, feeling a little defensive.
“He’s right, you know,” Louis said to Ian. “You’re just burning your money at this point, and it’s not even keeping you warm.”
And still Ian kept playing. When the time came, the two men put their cards down. Louis hesitantly revealed his hand: a pair of queens. The other players groaned as they realized that they had folded with much better cards. Ian sighed and offered up his cards. “I guess you got me. All I have is a high card of three…”
“Wait, what?” Barrett leaned over the table. “That means you have four of a kind in twos.”
“Oh! I didn’t even notice that,” Ian yelped, grateful. “I guess that means I win again. Also, here…” Ian offered his handkerchief to Louis. “I noticed you were sweating quite a bit. That’s not healthy, you know.”
Louis refused the handkerchief. “Everybody sweats.”
“Yes, but not in the middle of December.”
As the next game started, Ian asked casually, “So, Mr. Cobb, are we keeping you from something?”
“What’s that?”
“You’ve been looking at that clock as if it’s showing you a bit of leg.”
Elijah cleared his throat. “My train’s leaving at noon. I have a business meeting in Cheyenne.”
Ian looked surprised. “What are you still doing here then? I know we’re great company, but don’t miss your train on the account of us. I took a look at the train schedule when I walked by the station earlier. There won’t be another train coming through for at least a few more days.”
Elijah scoffed. “I’m right where I need to be.” He then looked at Ian’s scruffy look and his ragged coat – he couldn’t see Ian’s boots under the table, but he imagined them to be polished with mud. “What are you doing looking at a train schedule anyway? You look like you’ve never been on anything with wheels in your life, let alone a train.”
“You shouldn’t judge people, you know,” Ian pointed out. He added with a little smile, “Unless you’re me, of course.”
“What are you, a gypsy or something?” Barrett asked. “You’re going to tell me how I’m going to die by reading my palm?”
Ian shook his head. “I’m more fluent in the language of fingers. Like how your tell is that you run your fingers along your bald head like you’re running them through hair. Speaking of which, you should probably invest in a hat. Not only would it improve your poker game, but I can’t stand to look at that knobby head of yours. You have more hills on your skull than Rome…”
“Why you…” Barrett growled as he tried to reach for something in his pocket, but Natalie was still sitting on his lap and blocking his hand. He asked her in a voice that was casually dangerous, “Can you move so I can get my knife?”
“Aw, don’t stab him – not yet anyways,” Natalie said, her eyes laughing at Ian. “He’s too much fun.”
“Can we get back to the game, please?” Elijah asked, raising his voice like a fist.
Ian lightly smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I almost forgot that our good friend here has a train to catch for his business meeting. Speaking of which, I see you’re packing light. You don’t have any luggage with you. You don’t have a coat – don’t you know how cold it gets where we’re going? And you’ve been betting big, but not like a businessman would. You’re mocking me for looking poor, but I’m getting the impression that I’m the richer of us two.”
“I’m not poor. Someone broke into my room last night and took my stuff.”
“Poor, robbed – same difference,” Ian said with a shrug. “But I suspected as much. Your eyes are bloodshot – meaning you haven’t been getting your sleep – but you don’t have bags under your eyes, so whatever caused the insomnia happened recently. And the fact that you’re willing to miss your meeting over some silly game of poker means this game isn’t a game to you – it is desperation. It must have been a fortune you lost. But how do you expect to win back a fortune with the spare change you have in your pockets? I’m no physicist, but I’m pretty certain you can’t make something out of nothing. Unless, of course, you had some something else that was valuable, like, for example…”
“A first-class train ticket to Cheyenne?” Elijah offered, putting his ticket down on the table.
“Who in their right mind would play you for a ticket to Wyoming?” Louis demanded.
While looking Louis in the eye, Elijah pointed a finger at Ian from across the table. “He sounds interested.”
“Oh, I am,” Ian said, looking at the ticket. He couldn’t help but feel a little hungry for it. “I’ve heard good things about first class – it’s about time I experience it for myself, to see what I’ve been missing out on.”
“Are you sure it’s not because you have somewhere you have to be and the train that can get you there is booked solid? I should have known it was you.”
This caught Ian off guard. “Who am I, then?”
“You’re the man who robbed me. You ransacked my room last night, looking for this ticket, and now you’re here to finish what you’ve started.”
“I don’t have to answer to you. You’re not a marshal.”
Elijah looked thoughtful. “You’re right that I’m no marshal. But…” Elijah pulled a revolver out of his holster and aimed it at Ian’s forehead. “I carry like a marshal.”
The table went still, and for a moment, Ian thought he was caught up in the snare of a beautiful painting. The others looked ill, but Ian just smiled. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. You shoot me, and you lose the game.”
“How could I possibly lose?”
“Let’s play one round. If I win, I walk out of here with your ticket. If you win, I tell you where I hid your money and then you get to plant a bullet in my face. Just think about it – you can’t possibly shoot me, turn the town upside-down to find your money, and get on your train before it leaves.”
“You want to bet?” Elijah rumbled.
Just then, a train whistled somewhe
re. The floor under their feet vibrated and dust dripped down from the rafters above.
Ian’s smile widened. “Yes, I’m willing to bet on that. Now, let’s play.”
With that said, Ian took out a wad of cash and put down twenty-five dollars, equal to the cost of the first-class ticket. Elijah noticed that the billfold Ian had looked suspiciously like his own.
With the money and the ticket sitting between them, the pot suddenly became the richest man at the table. None of the others could match the stakes, and so they sat out and watched the two men duel. Elijah tried to keep his revolver trained on Ian while shuffling the deck of cards with one hand, looking awkward doing so. As some cards were tossed Ian’s way, he asked, “Do you want to know how I did it? How I robbed you?”
“No.”
Either Ian wasn’t paying attention or he couldn’t resist, because he continued. “I’ve heard stories about you, so I figured you must be well-paid for making trouble. And you’re a man always on the move, because if you stop, the law will finally catch up with you. You’re no better than a shark that has to keep swimming or else it dies. So you must keep your money on your person, and what a fortune you must have made over the years. But what if the sheriff stopped you while you were walking around town, and he found a gold mine that could walk and talk? You couldn’t risk it, so you hid your money in your room at the hotel, in a place where no one could have found it. I’ll take two cards, please.”
Ian traded his cards for fresh faces. He no longer had the look of a rookie – if anything, he looked downright dangerous at the game.
“When I broke into your room through the window – please be impressed, because your room was on the third floor – I must admit that I was fooled at first. You didn’t keep your money under the mattress, you didn’t keep it in the nightstand, and you certainly didn’t keep it in your luggage. So where could it have possibly been? And that’s when I saw it: an old copy of the magazine, The Pioneer.”
“Never heard of it,” Barrett grunted as Elijah traded a few of his cards, his hand shaky in more ways than one.
Ian said, “Of course not – few people have. But before the magazine died, it made one important contribution to literature, and that was it published Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the heartwarming story of a murderer who confesses to his crime after hearing his victim’s heart beating under the floorboards. Now, we both know that you’re a lackey deep down in your soul, and that you probably haven’t had a single original thought in your brain for years. As soon as I realized that, I could practically hear the money’s heartbeat under a loose floorboard in the corner of the room.”
“You wouldn’t even know what to do with that kind of money,” Elijah said, ready to flip over his cards and win his life back.
“I got exactly what I needed. I got you to show me where you’ve been hiding that train ticket of yours,” Ian said, putting his cards down triumphantly. The others leaned over the table and examined the hands. Elijah had a straight, but Ian had a full house. “Let me correct myself,” Ian said. “I meant to say where you’ve been hiding my ticket.”
Ian reached over and plucked the ticket from the table like it was a feather. “If you give me your address, I’ll write and let you know how nice Cheyenne is…”
Ian’s sentence was punctuated by the sound of Elijah unloading a round from his gun into the ceiling above them. There was a brief silence before Ian – who was unable to help it – said, “I don’t mean to be obvious, but if you were aiming for me, you missed.”
“Tell me where my stuff is!” Elijah screamed, finally losing his temper, when he should have lost it so long before.
“Since you asked so nicely, I threw your satchel into the river. I don’t know a thing about fashion, but trust me when I said I did you a favor. As for your money, it’s about to walk out of here, get on a horse, and chase after the train that’ll be pulling out of the station any minute. I guess what I’m trying to say is that I have all of your money.”
“So what’s stopping me from killing you now?” Elijah snarled.
“I guess you can say I have Jesus on my side.”
Elijah pushed down on the broken bone of the trigger and the gun screamed. The shot pounced across the table and buried itself in Ian’s chest. The other poker players yelped and stood up, one or two of them drawing their own revolvers. But Elijah was ready for them, and he scanned the group with his gun. “Don’t anyone move! I’ll make you regret it!” He screamed.
Ian, meanwhile, was slumped over the table. He was so still, he might as well have been asleep. But if he was asleep, that meant he had to wake up – and he did. Elijah and the others watched, shocked, as Ian slowly sat upright in his chair, massaging his tender chest, wincing. “Didn’t you think it was odd that everything in your room was stolen except for that revolver you kept in the nightstand? I ripped pieces of paper out of a Bible, took the bullets out of the cartridges, and replaced them with verses. I think you just shot me with a page out of Corinthians. I told you Jesus was on my side.”
His eyes wide, Elijah flipped the cylinder of the revolver open, to empty the blanks and to fill it with the real bullets that jangled in his pocket like coins. But, as he attempted to do so, he heard a hammer being cocked on a revolver that wasn’t his. He turned and saw the priest Harper aiming at him.
“Point a gun at me?” Harper asked icily.
The next few seconds were filled with the bells of shots, and passersby in the street were startled by the gunfight going on in the broken saloon, and they were even more taken aback when the saloon’s front door exploded open and Ian stumbled out of the clouds of gun smoke. Ian sprinted across the front porch, his feet pounding against the tight drum of the wooden planks, towards the hitching post. His calfskin satchel that was too rich for him was thumping at his side. The riot of noise from inside the saloon lit a fire under the herd of horses strapped to the post. The horses neighed and became nervous but one horse as white and quick as winter’s wind understood. It turned and offered its saddle like a sacrifice as Ian jumped off the porch, skipped off the railing, and landed on his means of escape. He unshackled the horse from the post and bunched the reins up in his hands. Never one to kick with the heel, Ian instead leaned forward and hissed a word in the horse’s ear. It was a secret trick that he picked up from his uncle.
Immediately, the horse reared before taking off like light from a candle. The horse took shattering strides: for every leap, Ian saw nothing but clouds that looked like the surf breaking over a reef, and for every fall, Ian saw the earth rise up to challenge him. It took every inch of Ian’s lean muscle to hold on to the earthquake beneath him. People slid past like paint dripping down a portrait. For a moment, he thought he heard the horse unleash an unearthly neigh, but the he realized it was the train’s whistle – the train would be pulling out of the station any moment, without him.
At the same time, Elijah had emerged from the saloon, wearing blood on his face like war paint. He was in such a daze, he wasn’t sure if the blood was his or someone else’s. Spitting iron, Elijah stumbled down the street, trying to find his runaway ticket. As he staggered around the corner of a general store, he found it. The train station sat just down the street, and Elijah saw people pouring out of the building like a spring from a leaky bucket. Elijah could hear some women screaming from inside of the station, and suddenly he knew to follow the screams. He rushed up to the entrance, forcing his way through the churning crowd. And at first, Elijah missed it, because it was camouflaged in the crowd’s shouts. But then he heard the familiar cry of the train whistle, and he suddenly realized that his train was leaving without him.
Elijah made his way to the door, roughly shoving aside a man leaning against the doorframe, and he plunged himself into the outside. He found himself at the end of the long platform, the wooden planks dyed a chocolate brown by the morning rain. To his horror, Elijah wa
tched as his train pulled out of the station, the locomotive straining against its harness. And, racing alongside the train, was Ian pushing his horse through the clouds of steam. The horse flew like Pegasus, its hooves clicking against the loose stones alongside the track.
As Ian pulled the nervous horse closer to the train, he took a second to glance back at the train station, already shrinking away into nothing. He could see the angry speck that was Elijah standing on the train tracks. Ian couldn’t see it quite clear, but he imagined that Elijah had his hands pressed to the sides of his head to keep a headache from exploding.
Ian took a deep breath and leapt from the horse to the platform of one of the coach cars before he could talk himself out of it. Ian landed on the platform, so surprised that he made it that he almost fell off. But Ian found his sea legs and grabbed ahold of the railing. Leaning out as far as he could, he blew a kiss, making sure to be exaggerated so that Elijah could see it.
“Tell the children I’ll write often!”
Chapter 2