Half Christmas

She slid her quite lovely ass into booth across from me, and gave me a overly bright smile. "Afternoon lover boy, how are you doing? Next week is your birthday? Feeling any closer to shuffling off this mortal coil? Have you named an heir to the ____ Empire yet? Not that I expect there is much to inherit other than unpaid bar tabs." I looked over at her, there was a time when looking at her was my full time job, a job I took with just a shade too much seriousness before it all went pear shaped, and ended in tears (mostly mine, I am not sure she is capable of crying).  Nowdays I was merely content with seeing her from a distance, generally a distance greater than the one currently between us. "I pay my debts. Well, eventually I pay my debts. I have yet to have Sully claim any of my possessions in form of payment." She let out a giggle, "your possessions are a lot of books that no one other than you would ever want to read. What would Sully do with them? Open a reading library for the drunk and cynical? Or maybe a primer for how to plan a failed revolution?" I laughed "none of the above sweetie, Sully knows my reading habits, in fact the bastard has read most of them himself. But I am not here to read Pilgrim's Progress,  I am here to find that old familiar drunken feeling, you know something that I can count on to the end, unlike you."

I sighed, " and yes it is my birthday next week. A day, which I might add, you helped me celebrate a few times in the past by each of us ending up in our birthday suits. Any chance that is why you are here today? One more trip around the bases for old times sake?" She smirked "not bloody likely lover boy, my new man might be a bit upset about that." I laughed "well we don't want to upset anybody now do we? That would just be a damn shame. So, exactly why are you here? To gloat about new boy toy? To rub it in that you won our dirty little war? We drifted apart for a reason, mainly you, so why don't you do exactly that and drift." A look of shock crossed her face, and I must confess I felt a little bit of joy about that. The fact that I could still shock her all these years later meant something. Granted, I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it meant something. Perhaps a shot of whiskey would help me figure it out.

She recovered her composure quickly enough, "I know you will find this hard to believe since you don't really believe in anything, but I do want what is best for you. I just wish you would figure out what is best for you" and pointing at my glass "before that swill kills you." I laughed "this swill as you put it, is about the only thing I want for my birthday. Not a new horse, a new gun, and certainly not a new you." I lifted my glass and swirled the amber liquid around slowly, you see even when whiskey lets me down, and it has several times in the past, at least it has the decency to get me drunk first." I continued "besides I can at least afford the whiskey it merely costs money, I can not afford another you, you cost people their souls."

She sniffed "always the brooding poet on that shit aren't you? You stopped making me happy, the skies became a lot greyer, and you took my sunshine away. That is why I left, this can not be a surprise to you." I laughed "and you call me Shakespeare? that was one of the most sadly eloquent things I've ever heard you say. Usually you saved your eloquence for roundly cursing me for the nine kinds of fool you thought me to be." She  shrugged "you are decidedly still nine kinds of a fool, but thankfully for the cosmos, you are no longer my fool to corral. The only reason I even remember it's your birthday is because you always referred to it as half-christmas, which from a pagan I always thought funny." 

"I don't exactly consider myself a pagan. It's not that I don't believe in god(s), I've just yet to accept their terms. Therefore, while we remain in negotiations about the terms of any worship/boon granting, I shall continue to find faith in nothing other than whiskey." I exhaled "other than coming here to celebrate me being a year closer to the grave, why are you here? It's not like we are getting the band back together, neither of us are going to change into the person the other one needs, and to be honest, you just make me sad. I look at you and see the what ifs of my history writ large in very, very bright letters that even at my drunkest I could read. I see the past we share and the future we should have had but for...." Here I trailed off, there was no need to say the same shit to her again all it did was give her an odd type of joy.

 She rolled her lovely eyes and said "to be such a well read man, you can be as thick as two boards. Of course the band is not getting back together, our past is just that past, we don't have a future, well at least together, and I figure with another birthday your future is dwindling away. So I thought that perhaps you'd have enough sense to understand why I am here. I guess, as usual, I have overestimated you." She stood to go with a slight frown on her face, but I waved her back down. "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you're telling me you've an actual reason to be here other than to torment me, and remind me how you want me to die in fire?" 

She sighed "yes Shakespeare, I am here for an actual reason, and it isn't to set you alight in some sort of reenactment of a Viking funeral, at least not yet. You'd probably be better off dead if you were to take the starring role in that act. I know it's hard for you but try to think. Think about it from your own point of view. If the roles were reversed why would you be here?" She stood up, and it began to dawn on me "but just in case the whiskey has addled the little sense you have left, here's a clue, and she slowly so very slowly unbuttoned two of the top buttons on her blouse. I don't need your mouth for the pretty words Shakespeare, I've other plans for it and you. Your tab is paid, and let's get out of here so we can go some place quiet like where you can unwrap your present, me."

 

 

Roseman's Farm

 

 The Duke of Wellington, when confronted with someone who tried to blackmail him by threatening to publish letters of his to his mistress, said "Publish and be damned" So here I go publishing, and I suspect I was already damned, but this certainly won't help. 

The disaster of Powers' Gate broke something in me. I am sure I wasn't the only one of Lobar's Wolves that felt that way, but fuck the Wolves, I was too busy trying not to die to worry about them. I suppose I should have cared, after all Lobar's Wolves had fed me for quite some time, and food is important to maintaining life. However, that kind of thinking was way beyond me after Powers' Gate. Powers' Gate made me want to curl into a ball and die. In fact, several people became quite worried that I would just go ahead and do what Powers' Gate failed to do, and kill myself. I don't know if that was the best idea, but a lot of people who pretended to give a shit about me were concerned it was the path I was going to take.The irony of people thinking I was going to off myself after a surviving a battle in which several people would have happily made me unalive, wasn't lost on me, but irony and all its complicated machinations wasn't exactly something that I was particularly worried about.

 However, offing yourself if you plan to do it right, takes a fair amount of thought. A fair amount of planning and an idea about what comes next. Not to you because you are as dead as dead can be, but to the poor sons of bitches you've left behind to clean up your shit. Shuffling off this mortal coil is easy enough, there are pills to make it happen, there are guns galore to put to your forehead, or in your mouth. There are even ways to make it happen where it looks like an accident. Jumping/falling in front of a train springs to mind. These ideas, and more (which we will save for a later day) all came to mind as I staggered away from Powers' Gate. I couldn't understand what happened at Powers' Gate, It was quite simply a disaster.

Disasters are hard to process, the mind can't grasp the information the world is feeding it. It is like the eruption of Vesuvius. It comes out of nowhere, at least to you, and it destroys everything in its path. It simply does not compute. You weren't prepared for this, and even if you had pretended you were, you really weren't ready for the scope of this. Powers' Gate was the hammer and you were the nail. It slammed into you like a shit ton of bricks, and left you pondering why you were left alive. The educated amongst us call it survivor's guilt. The survivors just call it being lucky. At the time, I called it a mistake. A mistake I thought long and hard about rectifying. 

Moral cowardice was the main reason I didn't finish what Powers' Gate had started. It is a lot easier to be physically brave/stupid when you are doing it in front of a crowd or as a group of people. Collective bravery comes from not wanting to be the first bastard to piss yourself, and run away screaming from potentially becoming thought about in the past tense. I drifted after the Gate, I had no desire to rejoin the remains of Lobar's Wolves (now branded La Compagnie du Chapeau, whatever the fuck that meant), and continue the soldiering life. 

I wasn't anybodies idea of Napoleon, but being a soldier was all that I knew. It was what I had been for the majority of my adult life, and now I was over it. It was wrenching, what was I to do now? Become a fucking farmer, planting some sort of seed I knew nothing about to raise crops I had no idea what to do with? Maybe go to sea and become a sailor, tricky since I was a sinker not a swimmer, and knew fuck all about the sailing life. Factory life? Being a wage slave had no appeal to me, but here I was shiftless, homeless, and clueless. Take the veil, or become a monk? Tricky to do that, when one doesn't believe in god (or at least the current, most popular god). Therefore, I doubted the priesthood was the answer to my question of how to stay alive. It was in this very confused state that I stumbled upon Roseman's Farm.

Despite the years that have passed since, I remember the exact moment I ran into Roseman's Farm. It wasn't planned, and it wasn't something that I saw coming, it just kind of happened. I didn't have Lobar's Wolves or Claudell's Marines at Roseman's Farm, it was just me. It was a simplified version of single combat, and it was all the more intense for that. Divisions and divisions of screaming men trying to murder each other for the love of God, King, and Country are all very confusing, and it is easy to get lost amongst the numbers, but here at Roseman's Farm it was just me, and well Roseman, the owner of aforementioned farm.

This "single combat" was new to me, and I must confess rather confusing. How does one hide in this situation? How does one pretend not to be terrified? Terror, when  you are feeling it among a few hundred other people isn't as awful as one would think. Terror when there is no one to share it with, is crippling. You can't make this type of terror unhappen. It strikes deep inside of you, and makes you want to be anyone else but yourself right now. 

I spent a considerable amount of time on Roseman's Farm. I learned a fair amount about myself, the wolf that raised me, and life in general. If you consider Roseman's Farm a battle, which I am not sure that you should, I would count it as a victory. I walked away from Roseman's Farm, which was the goal. Sometimes walking away is as good as it gets. We don't have to bring back cannons or flags of the "enemy" to adorn the halls of our fair city to prove our success. Sometimes just not losing is to be considered a win.

At the time, I had no idea that this was the first "battle" of Roseman's Farn. After all, it was just a speck on the map, not one that would stand out to anyone making any sort of useful map. A map that I was going to pull out of its case and find a black spot on, and decide that was where I needed to go next. 

 

Waiting on a Train

 I peered off into the distance, every since Big Ed Magee had punched me back into the stone age about a year or so ago in some dusty no name town in the Dakota territory, I didn't see so good. At the time I figured it would go away, but it seemed I was stuck with a bit of permanent blurry vision. I'd like to say that fucking Big Ed's sister was worth, but truth be told, it probably wasn't. Don't get me wrong she was lovely, but Big Ed didn't cotton to the idea of some "low life scum" such as myself planting a seed that would grow into the family tree. That is just a long winded way of saying I couldn't see a fucking thing past about 30 yards in front of me, so I had no idea what I was peering towards. Luckily for me the sound carried, Big Ed's punch didn't affect me hearing, and a train whistle is pretty damn loud. Even more lucky for me, I had the Kid next to me, the Kid had a lot of flaws, but poor eyesight wasn't one of them. If for no other reason than that, he was useful to have around, helps you figure out which direction to shoot. 

Hopefully no one would need to be shot, I wasn't much of the killer type, not like the Kid. The Kid was a killer's killer. Something inside the Kid didn't complete the cycle it was supposed to, and because of that (maybe?) he was a stone, cold killer. I don't think he enjoyed it, I never really felt the need to inquire too deeply into what made the Kid tick, or rather tick so loudly. I didn't figure it would help me sleep at night, nor would I be able to resolve whatever the fuck issues he had, I'm no head doctor. Hell, I am no kind of doctor, I rob trains and, when the mood strikes me, the occasional bank.

Which is why I was here, blindly peering towards the sound of a train's whistle in the middle distance, and checking to make sure my gun was at least loaded. I had no doubt that if anyone needed a little "lead poisoning" either the Kid, or our fellow desperado, a dude by the name of Shaw would be more than happy to unalive someone.  I didn't know much about Shaw, he was laconic personified. If you asked Shaw a question, and got more than four words in reply it was a minor miracle. In fact, the Kid and I had a running bet on just such a thing. So far, the Kid owed me about 11 pints or 4 shots of whiskey, or any combination of the two. However, Shaw wasn't in the outfit to entertain us with speeches from Hamlet or Macbeth. Shaw wasn't quite the killer that the Kid was, but he wasn't exactly shy of pulling his big iron to settle any sort of dispute. Some questions don't need more than four words for an answer.

The Kid was a pretty bright boy, and he had picked our spot well, the train with all that lovely money that we needed to keep all the pretty whores in the territory happy, would have to come to almost a full stop as it rounded Pembeton's Bend.  Which, if the plan went as it was supposed to, three desperadoes, would approach the nearly stopped train, "convince" the engineer to come to a complete stop, while we relieved the _____ Courier Company of its monthly payroll. I knew that the payroll was destined for working men unlike myself, but I figured the company could afford to replace the loss, and beside those pretty whores weren't interested in me for my looks. If she can't love you for who you are (and to be honest I couldn't blame her), then at least let her love you for the money you spend on her.

The whistle got closer and the train began to struggle around the bend, which had the advantage of slowing it considerably down, and off we went 3 idiot desperadoes waiting on a train. We got it stopped easily enough, too easy now that I think about it, but at the time what did I know about stopping trains?  We did the whole cliche of "hands up and no one gets hurt" bullshit. And Shaw kept the passengers "calm" while the Kid and I moved toward the big payday. Just as one would expect, some overly loyal employee of the _____ Courier Company barred our way. The Kid asked "George" very politely to open the safe, but out a misplaced loyalty George refused. 

Unlike all the stories you hear, saying "no" to a fellow intent on robbing you does not end well for you. The Kid sighed deeply and then very calmly shot George in the forehead. As George toppled over, as dead as dead can be, the Kid slowly stepped over his body, placed what he thought was just enough dynamite against the safe, lit the fuse, and yelled let's blow baby!!!" And blow it did, the fucking amount of dynamite the Kid used might have opened the gates of Heaven, and they sure as fuck blew the door right off the ____ Courier Company's safe, and left me with a slight ringing in my ears that persists to this day. At this rate, I'd be blind and deaf in a year, and of little use to the Kid, or the pretty whores. 

"Burned money doesn't spend Kid" I said when I was able to stop the dust from choking me to death. The Kid spat out a mouthful of dust himself, and just laughed, "gold don't burn my boy."  As a few paper bills swirled in the aftermath of the Kid's dynamite experiment, I arched an eyebrow. "what do you mean gold? I thought we was after the payroll." The Kid looked at me like I was simple, and replied "don't think GI, when you think you weaken the nation. Just point your gun at who I tell you to, and try to look desperate when the occasion calls for it, oh and grab the other end of that there box. Your strong back is more use of me than your half blind eyes." 

"The _____ Courier Company doesn't pay its employees in gold Kid, so what the fuck are you babbling about gold for?" The Kid nodded "they surely don't, and we ain't here for no fucking payroll to deprive some poor son of a bitch of his monthly wages. We, my little buttercup, are here for that there box. Which, I might add, I asked you to grab the other end of already." I glared at him, and then grabbed the other end of the box. The dynamite hadn't done a lot of damage to it, and stenciled on the side of it were words that made my blood run cold. "Fuck me Kid, have you lost the last part of your mind? We can't rob this, this will get us hanged, and probably hanged again for good measure as a way to discourage others. Don't you remember what these sons of bitches (here I pointed to the box) did to Black Tom Doyle? Took his fucking head clean off when they hanged him. Folks still talk about it and it has been 7 years ago. They say half the town fainted when his head popped off like a cork coming out of a bottle."

The Kid shrugged, "they'd hang us anyway" he pointed at George's body. "Killing that fellow isn't exactly going to be counted as community service in these parts, so we might as we get as many dollars as we can, while we can." I grunted I supposed he had a point, but still being hanged once and proper like was bad, being hanged by the bastards we were now robbing would be twice as bad, even if you were just as dead either way.  Just then Shaw came through the door, looked around at the disaster we had created with the dynamite, saw the box, saw the words on the box, and said  "what the fuck are you idiots doing? We came for payroll not that shite." much more than four words, thus costing me one shot of whiskey. I only hoped to remain alive to buy it for the Kid. 

The Kid smiled, looked at me and said "you owe me a shot of whiskey that was 14 whole words." Then he looked at Shaw and said "stop making speeches and go get the fucking horses you ape, we need to be anywhere but here, and quick like." Shaw, having used up his allotment of words for the week, just nodded and went to get the horses as he was bidden. We lugged the box out of the boxcar, put in on the spare horse, and rode like the devil himself was after us for almost a full day, until we decided that killing our horses would be a bad plan, and we could at least pretend we were safely far enough away from the scene of the crime to rest.

When we woke up from what seemed a week of sleep, and opened box, we found enough gold to make Midas jealous. Gobs of the stuff, it was like finding Blackbeard's long lost treasure, gold, gold, everywhere gold. I confess it gave me heart palpitations, and I idled away a few lovely hours thinking of how all the lovely whores in the territory would find me handsome for at least a year with all this gold in my pockets. Which as it turns out was way overestimating how long all this gold would last. You see, the ___ Mining Company, whose name was on the box, were a proper set of bastards, and apparently clever ones as well. It seems they had been robbed before by other immoral, thieving bastards (unlike us), and had taken to spreading a thin layer of real gold coins on the top of every box to make it look like we had made the haul of the century. As we later found out, to our cost, the rest of the "gold" coins were brass painted up to look like gold. Our take was barely enough to keep me in whiskey and whores for a week (not that I stinted myself on either, but I am not a spendthrift either). 

However, one thing we did 'gain' from our little robbery, was a lovely pair of watches that Shaw had taken off a couple of passengers, and the eternal enmity of the _____ Mining Company, which wasn't exactly what I was aiming for, but it seems they take losing any amount of coin as a personal insult. I considered the brass coins the insult myself, and therefore the ____ Mining Company and I were going to have a long, healthy hate, providing one of their hired dicks didn't shoot me in the back like a dog one day. Those watches would come in handy in later days, but those are stories for another time. This was merely a starter tale to the life I lived with the Kid, and how shockingly the only one of us to end up dancing at the end of a rope was Shaw.