Western Short Story
Gray Day in a Gray Town
Tom Sheehan
Western Short Story
It
was a gray day in a gray town, somber, like the day after a holiday,
hangovers plentiful, the sheriff still sleeping off a bad night and
locked in one of his own cells and so far totally unaware of it, the
stagecoach from Mercyville almost a full day late and carrying a
delivery of canned peaches as a favor for Bart Hall of the general
store, and the gruesome, merciless gunfighter Boxer Agrunts was newly
arrived in Boothill Leveled, a new town barely 10 years old at the
edge of the Snake River where it makes its sharpest turn in the long
route south. The somber day sat atop him.
The sheriff, Kirby
Nowell, was practically the first paper-pusher in town; most of his
efforts, other than spending time in Sadie Kemps saloon, The Ladies
Kettle, was arranging wanted posters on the wall of his office,
making sure on every prudent occasion to hide a poster if the subject
came into town. His next big arrest would be his first and he had not
heard that Agrunts was visiting. Nobody in Boothill Leveled had
bothered to yell the news in through the open door of the sheriff’s
office and two-cell jail; why wake him up just to cover Agrunts’
poster on the board with a poster of Jack Gruden, long dead, or Wiley
Lockburn, already six years in solitary in Yuma Territorial Prison,
or Smooth Billy Two-guns, now probably 91 years old and known to be
living in New York City on a bet that he must have won by this time?
The best business man, most lucid and cogent individual in
town, the true pillar of the community, was the owner of the store.
Bart Hall had built the store, the first structure when the community
started, because he could see the river just below making a grand
turn in the geography of its long run, and knew what it would
eventually bring to any place on the site, where the dead from an
older settlement had been buried without name, memorial, or precise
location, except as said “on that grumpy little hill over there
where the dead guys are buried.” So Hall called the place Boothill
Leveled and the name stuck just as did the name of his store,
Boothill Leveled Trader, which people simply called BLT, and which
now was out of canned peaches.
Canned peaches, for the
outlander to the western plains, without the simple knowledge of
trail drives and inherent needs of drovers coming into a town, dust
in their lungs and throats, mouths dry and sweetness unknown for
weeks or months at a time, unless they had dared open a bees nest.
Other than beer, whiskey or a friendly face, there was nothing like a
can of peaches to have as one’s own, or, for the best of friends,
to be shared apart from all other hungry folk, outside town, or at a
campfire, or behind the livery before the horses were taken care of,
like good cowboys did.
Agrunts voice was rising in its
declarations. “Whadyamean, you don’t have no canned peaches?”
He had come into the store smiling, the calling in his throat, that
sweet taste, that overcoming pleasure, solace coming so close to the
deprived.
“Of course you have some canned peaches. All
stores carry canned peaches. I seen them in every store in every
state and territory. Peaches. I want my peaches.”
Agrunts’
eyes were alive, lit up like a cindered orb, like the orange-red moon
of October nights. “That’s all I want, a can or two of peaches.
You probably got them hidden under the counter or in the back or in
some secret overhead hiding place, put away for your favorite
customers, like the saloon owner or the damned barber or the sheriff
or the mayor or whoever runs this place these days. Favored
customers, not someone like me, get the peaches.”
His body
swayed in place, seeking balance and equilibrium, determining proper
posture, his hands suddenly as itchy and dry as his throat. “Well,
it ain’t right and I aim to get my peaches,” and with that he
went for his gun to aim it at Hall behind the counter, who was a
might quicker for a common dispenser of canned peaches and had a
double-barreled shotgun on his hip like he had been shooting
squirrels in the trees at that precise time and knocking out their
eyes at fifty feet.
There was not a single token of shaking in
Hall’s hands, the shotgun steady, its aim clearly mid-section of
Agrunts’ wide and flabby frame with his hand hung in the air as if
he was measuring death or peaches sliding their smoothness and sweet
texture upon his tongue before he’d chaw a peach half into
quarters, finding salvation from the trail.
Agrunt started
shaking, convulsing, his eyes playing tag with each other, hiding,
coming back from the top of his head, the whites of them on
parade.
Hall held the shotgun steady. This man in front of him
was a terror at murder and holding up banks and robbing the new
trains running across the wide grass of the plains to little towns
like Boothill Leveled, generally supplying BLT with all its needs. He
had read the poster on Agrunts, felt like he knew the man. Now the
stage was late with his special order. He’d paid extra for it. No
free shipping out here in the west. No one-day specials for him.
He
felt he was at a stand-off. He didn’t want to shoot a man over a
can or two of peaches, but the man was shaking, the robber was
shaking, the notorious bandit and killer was shaking. Hall had to
protect himself if it went any further. His finger tightened on the
trigger; he got himself ready for a No Sale.
Agrunts, still
shaking and convulsing, nerves perhaps gone to pot, in a mood of
moods that controlled his body, set his mind, began to cry like a
baby. He sat down on the floor and kicked his boot heels on the
floor, and pounded out his sadness and loss, and suddenly began to
cry. His pistol fell noisily from his holster and skittered on the
floor. He did not even look at it.
“I want my peaches,” he
said. “I want my peaches.” He sobbed it out, “I want my
peaches,” his voice falling away into unintelligible words, and
came back to plead, “One simple can of peaches.”
Hall
subsequently, a tear in his own eye, escorted Agrunts, with the bore
of the shotgun at the wanted man’s back, to the jail.
As
inevitably foreseen, the sheriff was still sleeping off his hangover,
and still in a locked cell. The other cell was empty. Hall searched
the desk and the wall and could not find the key to the other cell.
He was about to give the whole thing up, let the prisoner go,
apologize for being out of peaches, when Agrunts screamed the most
joyous of screams, and raced to one corner of the office, and picked
off a single shelf holding a shaving mug and a razor and a bar of
soap, one #10 can of peach halves.
And Agrunt began crying
again as Hall, retrieving a crude opener from the office desk, began
to open the supposedly only available can of peaches in Boothill
Leveled, on the banks of the Snake River, and the stage still late
with the special delivery, the single available can clearly bearing
the embolden identification of “Ogden Canning Co.,
Utah/Peaches.”
Agrunt, sitting at the sheriff’s desk, his
mouth watering as he prepared to sink his knife into a delectable
peach half sitting at the top of the opened can, did not even notice
his poster prominently displayed on the sheriff’s poster
board.
His gray day had gotten brighter.
