All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred three)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Four

Counterfeits

(part one hundred three)

The long walk had burned off most of what filled his stomach. The pint churned on fumes of Mary’s chicken stew. The cloth he breathed into breathed back, dead foul air. Richard’s hands and feet started to feel hot. A will to fight came on.

A lifetime ago, euphoria might have, near the peak of a good drunk. Only a simmering now, an absence of aches, a freer play of emotion…

Richard giggled. Fear loomed. You’re giving yourself away. Somehow…and it was a great labor, forcing this thought to make sense of itself…somehow she had beaten him, Miss Gremot, and he owed her a debt. Mistake not his, but Lawrence hated him, and Mama hated him. Goddamn, goddamn.

He put an elbow up, arm crooked across the table for support.

“Damn, don’t you pull that down!”

Having a little pocket change, whisky the only thing to spend it on, he was making for the bar. Hopper didn’t need to yell. Since getting up was taking time, Richard sat, on the floor. The chair had shifted itself out of aim.

Maybe Sheriff Holland didn’t look tonight for his whipping boy.

I’d never known he was here, if I wasn’t here. So much was in this truism that Richard, under the table again, sat nodding for a time.

Things got stolen. Everyone said it’s the railroad men. Gremot didn’t get stolen from, cause he would truly shoot you dead.

Each of these was a weighty statement.

Then Hopper had Richard by the arm. A lot of range in Hopper’s hands, getting him by both arms, also his bunched-up trouser band. Richard’s pockets spilled coins. He squirmed after a third hand catching them first, and Hopper let him fall to his knees.

“Don’t you take them.”

“Oh, hell, shut up, Everard.”

He was being badgered into the night. The man with his money talked to Hopper, their voices a little audible, not speaking words. Richard spoke, found he hadn’t listened, but that the man answered.

“Bank of Mrs. Hopper. You’ll thank me. Come asking sober.”

In the dank outdoors, air too muggy to suck in lungfuls, they let Richard sway on his feet.

Tinker just sank and closed his eyes…

No, someone said this, it wasn’t a thought.

“Snedden lay him up. You be in town, find out what the bill is.”

Laughter. Three, now? One joked, “All them Temprance Fellas prayers gone wasted. Lordy, take up in your arms a poor soul done by demon rum…”

“Naw, Tinker didn’t want the Methodists.”

The newcomer mocked out a string of syllables, a pretense of Latin. The notion in Richard’s head, boiling up in the moment, was that this man had stolen his money and given it to Hopper, to pay Snedden for interring Tinker.

110

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred four)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)