Piano Man Read online

  P I A N O M A N

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 Bill Crider

  ISBN: 194129829X

  ISBN 13: 9781941298299

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  CONTENTS

  Piano Man

  I was just the piano man. Nobody ever paid any attention to me. My job was to play while the customers gambled and whored and drank. I never said much, but I’d watch and I’d listen. That’s what I was doing the night a man named Morgan bet his daughter on a poker hand.

  It was deep in the fall of 1880, and I was working in the Bad Dog Saloon near Fort Laramie. The glory days of the Oregon Trail were a long time gone, but people still came along, all the time. The fort itself had become almost civilized by that time, with boardwalks in front of the officers’ houses and even a few trees that someone had planted to keep the place from looking so bare.

  The Bad Dog wasn’t anywhere near civilized, and it catered to a rough crowd: bullwhackers, trappers who thought there were still pelts in the mountains, whores, and gamblers who preyed on hapless pilgrims.

  Like Morgan, who’d started out too late in the year, got caught by an early snow, and was now down on his luck and hurting for cash. And drunk and stupid enough to try to win some in a poker game in a place like the Bad Dog Saloon.

  “Play ‘Nellie Was a Lady’!” some maudlin drunk yelled, and I did, moving right on to “Hard Times Come again no More” after that, but all the while I had my eyes on Morgan’s daughter.

  She must’ve been about fifteen, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and an innocent face like an angel. She sat there with her chair against the wall, fifteen feet away from the table where her father was about to bet her on the cards he held.

  “I ain’t got enough money to stay in the pot,” he said. He had a big voice to go with his thick neck and wide shoulders. The drunken desperation rolled of him in waves. “But I’m stayin’ in. I’ll bet the girl.”

  I glanced over at her when he said that. She didn’t say a word, didn’t even move. Just kept looking straight ahead out of those blue eyes.

  Two of the other men at the table folded then. They were cold men, hard men, but that was a little too much even for them.

  Ray Tabor didn’t fold. He owned the saloon, and compared to him the snow outside was warm. He sat at the table in his wheelchair. It had a wooden frame, big spoked wheels, and a wicker seat. Texas Mary stood behind him. She was a whore but she worked for Tabor, like all the whores in the saloon, and she was his favorite. She was his whenever he wanted her, paying customers be damned.

  He looked over at the girl and licked his thin lips. Then he looked at the pot.

  “That’s a hundred dollar bet,” he said.

  Morgan nodded. “The girl’s worth it.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” Tabor smiled. “Very well, let’s say you’ve called.”

  He fanned out his cards on the table.

  “Full house.”

  Morgan swallowed hard. I couldn’t see his hand from where I sat, but I figured it was something pitiful, a pair of threes maybe. Two pair at best. Morgan was a fool.

  He didn’t even show his cards. He stood up fast, knocking over his chair. His hand went for the pistol at his hip.

  Texas Mary had moved around behind him, so I launched into “Rock of Ages,” which would do, I figured, for his funeral song. Except Mary didn’t shoot him with the little derringer she carried. She hit him in back of the head with a whiskey bottle before he could draw. He fell face-first onto the table, and broke his nose.

  I played “Oh, Susannah,” to get the boys in a jolly mood and take their minds off Morgan, who was pulled off the table and dragged out the door by the other two gamblers. They threw him out in the street, with Tabor looking at that little girl like a hungry dog looks at a meaty bone.

  He spun his chair around and wheeled off to the back, toward the hall leading off to his room.

  “Bring her to me,” he said to Texas Mary, who smiled. She’d have more time to make money if Tabor was otherwise occupied.

  She went over to the girl, who was staring at the door. Texas Mary took hold of her arm and pulled her out of the chair. She didn’t want to come along and dug in her heels. Texas Mary slapped her a time or two, and that got her moving. She whimpered like a whipped dog and looked over her shoulder when Mary dragged her into the dark hall. Tears ran down her angelic face. Nobody made a move to help. They knew Tabor too well.

  I played “Carve dat Possum” to cover the sound of the girl’s crying, because someone’s possum was sure enough about to get carved. Not that it was any business of mine.

  I was a godly man once. My father was a preacher, and the first songs I played were things like “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” “Just as I Am, without One Plea,” “Fairest Lord Jesus.” Nobody had to teach me. The music was just in me. If I heard the song, I could play it, and when I sat down at the piano and looked at the keys, it came out through my fingers. My parents thought it was a wonderful thing, a gift from God that would lead me to a life of service to the Lord.

  It didn’t turn out that way. As I got older, I found the call of the flesh far stronger than that call of the spirit, and I found that any number of lovely young women (and even more older ones) were eager to show their appreciation of my playing by letting me have my way with them after the services. That sort of thing did not endear me to the deeply religious husbands of many of the women. My fondness for the strong liquor, the only spirits I truly appreciated, did little to endear me to my parents, or to anyone else.

  By the time I was twenty, I was a serious toper, and by the time I was twenty-two, I was a dangerous degenerate in my parents’ eyes. I hadn’t entered a house of worship in over a year. The only employment I could find was playing piano in saloons and whorehouses, and over time I was so overwhelmed by drink that even the more high-toned among those places wouldn’t have me.

  One morning I woke up lying on a pile of garbage in an alley somewhere. I didn’t know the name of the town or how I’d gotten there. It was some time before I could even remember my name. I was so frightened by the experience that I vowed never to drink liquor or consort with prostitutes again.

  It was a vow in vain, of course, as most vows of that kind are, but I did manage to achieve occasional sobriety, or at least the appearance of it. As to consorting with prostitutes, by that time the liquor had almost eliminated the desire for physical contact with the opposite sex, and I was convinced that merely playing piano in the vicinity of the soiled doves could do me no harm.

  The piano was all I knew. Playing it was all I had left. I had to do it somewhere. Which more or less explains how I came to be in the Bad Dog Saloon.

  “What do you think he does to her?”

  That was what Frank wanted to know. Frank was the bartender in the Bad Dog, and when things were slow in the afternoon, sometimes he’d come over to the piano and talk or ask me to play “When You and I were Young, Maggie” or “I’ll Take you Home Again, Kathleen.” He was a sentimental man, was Frank.

  “It’s not any of our concern, Frank,” I told him, trying not to think about it.

  “Yeah, I guess not. How about you playin’ “In the Sweet By and By.”

  I did, and he sang along in a passable tenor. I didn’t join in. I don’t sing, and for some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d asked, even if it was none of my concern.

  Morgan came back the day after h
e’d bet his daughter. Tabor had probably been expecting him because he’d told Hamp to stay close. Hamp was the bouncer. He was big as a bear and had only one eye. The lack of the other one didn’t slow him down any when it came to knocking heads, and the eye–patch he wore to cover the hole added to his generally scary appearance. He liked to work with an ax handle, and he had it close by that day.

  Morgan’s nose was a mess. He was about as big as Hamp, and he didn’t look scared, but that might have been because he was drunk again. Or still. He walked right up to Tabor and said, “I want the girl back.”

  Tabor was playing cards. He didn’t even look up. He said, “You can’t have her.”

  Morgan swayed a little on his feet. “You know it ain’t right for you to keep her.”

  “I won,” Tabor said. “You lost. Now get out of my saloon.”

  Morgan took an awkward step toward him, breathing heavily through his open mouth. “You fuckin’ cripple.”

  Tabor spun the chair around and faced him.

  Morgan stopped short and almost fell. He steadied himself and said, “I’ll get the major at the fort, by God. He’ll make you give my girl back to me.”

  “The major has no jurisdiction over me.”

  Tabor started to turn back to the table, and Morgan jumped for him, his big hands ready to strangle the life from him.

  Hamp hit him with the ax handle in just about the same place Texas Mary had landed the whiskey bottle, only harder. I wondered if Morgan would ever wake up this time.

  Tabor didn’t give a damn. He told Hamp to take him to his wagon. “Pay somebody to drive him down the trail eight or ten miles and leave him.”

  Hamp nodded. He wasn’t one to talk much. He picked Morgan up under the arms and dragged him out.

  I don’t think they expected to see him again. They thought he’d give up and move along.

  They were wrong.

  Tabor had broken both legs in a riding accident years before. They’d been badly set and never healed right. He could walk a little with the help of a couple of canes, but he seldom resorted to them except when he used the privy out back. Sometimes he didn’t even go to bed. He just slept in his chair. When he wanted to bathe or put on his clothes, Texas Mary helped him.

  All that changed when he won Morgan’s daughter. She lived in his room and hardly ever came out. Morgan wouldn’t let her leave. He owned her, and as far as he was concerned, she was nothing more than his slave. I knew it wasn’t right, but what could I do?

  Tabor let me live in a little room in the saloon on the floor with the whores. It wasn’t much of a room, but it was better than sleeping in an alley, and up until now I’d liked it fine.

  Not anymore. It was right over Tabor’s room, and after I’d stopped playing for the night and gone up to sleep, I could hear them down there, Tabor grunting like an animal. I couldn’t help thinking about the girl’s innocent face and the indecent things he was forcing her to do.

  The more I tried not to think about it, the more I did. Maybe it was my Christian upbringing causing my conscience to come back to life. I remembered my father’s face in the pulpit, distorted and red as he denounced the sins of the flesh that I’d taken up with such enthusiasm. I wondered if he’d been right all along.

  Or maybe it wasn’t my upbringing. Maybe I wished the girl were doing those things to me.

  Morgan came back. It could have been that his own conscience was consuming him. This time he brought someone with him, an older man named Tumlin, who should have known better than to follow a fool like Morgan.

  They both had guns, but it didn’t help them. Hamp used the ax handle to break the older man’s arm just above the wrist, and his gun thumped to the floor, discharging a bullet that clanged into the railing of the bar.

  Hamp twirled the handle so fast it looked like the spoke of a wagon wheel. Then he slammed the butt end of it into Morgan’s soft belly, and all the air wheezed out of Morgan’s lungs. It was followed by the remains of Morgan’s last meal, which made a considerable stink.

  Tabor was in his room while all this was going on. He never came out, and neither did the girl. I didn’t know what they were doing in there. I didn’t want to know.

  “What’re you gonna do with ‘em?” Frank asked Hamp.

  Hamp didn’t say anything, just went to work on Morgan with the handle. Broke a few ribs, re-broke his nose. Knocked out some teeth. I sat and watched. It wasn’t my place to interfere.

  When he was finished, Hamp dragged Morgan outside and left him. The other man managed to get out on his own.

  “You should’ve killed him,” Frank said when Hamp came back inside. “He’s not gonna quit.”

  Hamp shrugged. “Maybe he’ll freeze to death.”

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “Maybe he will.”

  Every night I had to listen to Tabor rutting with the girl. I thought about her hands, her red mouth. Her innocent face. I imagined Tabor’s hands tangled in her blonde hair as he forced her head down on him.

  I could have drunk myself to sleep. I don’t know why I didn’t. It couldn’t have been because I wanted to hear. I know I didn’t want that. That’s what I told myself.

  It was about a week later that Morgan came back one last time. It was early morning, about three or four, still dark outside. The saloon was quiet except for the creaking of the boards in the cold, and everyone was asleep except me.

  I was awake because I’d found it harder and harder to sleep even after the sounds from the room below had stopped. I’d lie there and try to think about music, the songs I used to play in my father’s church: “My Faith Looks up to Thee,” “Jesus, Lover of my Soul,” “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” “Holy, Holy, Holy.” For some reason the songs were a comfort to me, and my fingers moved on an invisible keyboard as the imagined melodies filled the dark room. Music had kept me sane for years, and it was calming to me even now.

  Finally my fingers stopped moving. I still couldn’t sleep, so I decided to take a trip to the privy. My bladder needed emptying, and maybe if I were more comfortable I’d drift off before dawn.

  It was quiet in the saloon. All the girls were sleeping. I heard one of them snoring behind a closed door as I walked down the hall. Their customers were long gone. It being a week-night, there hadn’t been too many of them anyway.

  No sound came from Tabor’s room, though it had been plenty noisy earlier. I tried not to think about that. I went past and out the back.

  The alley was dark, the moon down already and the sky covered with heavy clouds. I didn’t need light to find the privy. I could locate it by the smell in the shivery cold.

  As I was about to open the door, I smelled something else. Coal oil. I turned from the door and saw movement out of the corner of my eye. It was like the shifting of a shadow, nothing more than that, and it was all the warning I got before Morgan hit me in the side of the head with a big fist and knocked me flat.

  I didn’t know it was Morgan who’d hit me, not until later, when I came to and he was tying my hands.

  “What the hell?” I said.

  “Shut up,” he said and stuck something in my mouth.

  It was a rag that tasted of coal oil, and I tried to spit it out. I couldn’t. I choked and thought I might puke.

  Morgan didn’t care. He went about his business, soaking the base of the building with coal oil, stuffing more of the oil-soaked rags around in any cracks he could find and around the windows.

  It didn’t take him long. He came back over to me and stuck his face close to mine. He said, “You’re damn lucky you ain’t in there.”

  I could smell the liquor on his hot breath even with the rag in my mouth and under my nose.

  “Teach that bastard he can’t take my girl,” Morgan said.

  I didn’t see how burning the place down and maybe killing everybody in it including his daughter would teach anybody anything. Maybe Morgan thought he could get her out.

  He turned away from me and went back to the wall. I tested
the ropes. A drunk man’s not always good at tying knots, but these held. The rope wasn’t tight, though. There was some play in it, so I started working at it.

  Morgan struck a lucifer with his fingernail and set one of the rags on fire. It took a couple of seconds, but it burned fast after that. He went on to the others, and sooner than you’d think the whole wall was flaming. He stood back and looked at it with apparent satisfaction.

  “I don’t give a damn about the girl now,” he said, looking around at me as if I’d asked. “The bitch coulda left him, but she didn’t. She’s ruined. She’s no daughter of mine.”

  He turned back to watch the blaze.

  She could have left. That was true. Why hadn’t she? I didn’t know, but I knew she wasn’t ruined. Morgan was a bigger fool that I’d thought.

  The ropes were coming loose, but I didn’t think I’d get them off in time to do anything. Morgan looked back at me, and grinned. He bent down and picked up a hammer and a board and started to nail the board across the door.

  The flames crackled, and I heard screams from inside. They’ll go out the front door, I thought, but when I heard the shotgun blast I knew better.

  Morgan tossed the hammer down, not far from where I sat.

  “Old man Tumlin’s out front,” he said. “That bastard Hamp should never have broke his wrist. He’ll keep ‘em in there.”

  He would until someone stopped him, I thought, or until they got truly desperate. Maybe someone would stop him soon, but it would be too long for the people inside.

  The ropes came loose. I pulled the rag from my mouth. I grabbed the hammer, jumped up, and hit Morgan in the forehead. He fell without a sound, and I flipped the hammer over to use the claw on the board. People pounded on the other side of the door, screaming in panic.

  As soon as I ripped the board, the door flung open and knocked me backward and down. I was almost trampled as the whores came out, Texas Mary in the lead. Hamp’s room was across the hall from Tabor’s. Hamp was right behind the whores. Tabor and the girl were still inside.