His Tumbling T equivalent argued right back. “Hey, your fella tumbled to the cough drop, but he never did name the beer. So by rights, we win the bet.”
“Tell it in church, ye whistledick,” the Jersey Mosquito put a stop to this. “We’re claimin’ the pot fair and square,” he declared, whipping off his hat and scooping the pile of money into it. Then with surprising agility, he hoisted his bony old rump onto the bar, swung his legs over as the Tumbling T gang made futile grabs at him and Babs screeched a protest, and disappeared down among beer barrels and such, clutching the hatful of cash to him.
That set off general mayhem.
Each crew charged at the other, swearing and squaring off. Harv seemed to be in his element, flooring one Tumbling T opponent with a roundhouse punch and taking on the next without drawing a breath. Fingy and Pooch between them were fending with a burly member of the other crew. As befitted their leadership positions, Highpockets and Deacon singled each other out, locked together in a revolving grapple along the length of the bar that sent beer glasses shattering and stools tumbling like dominoes. Peerless and Midnight Frankie and Shakespeare each were honorably engaged in tussles of their own with Tumbling T bettors yowling for their money back.
Amidst the battle royal I saw Babs pull out a pool stick sawed off to the right length to make a good club and start around the end of the bar to put it to use.
Taking that as a signal this was getting serious, I tugged at Herman for us to clear out of there. Blinking his good eye at the melee around him, he resisted my pulling, saying thickly, “Wait, Donny. Oops, Scotty. You know who I mean. Let’s don’t go, I have to help fellas fight.”
“Nothing doing. You’ve had your war,” I gritted out, and hauled at him with all my might, yanking him off the bar stool in the direction of the door. In my death grip on his arm, he stumbled after me as we skinned along the bar, ducking and dodging swinging fists and reeling bodies as much as we could, out into the street to where the pickup was parked, and got him seated on the running board. “Don’t move,” I said. “Sing a song, say poetry, do something.”
“Good eye-dea,” he said dreamily, and began to recite the rhyme we fashioned on the last bus:
When you take a look in your memory book
Here you will find the lasting kind,
Old rhymes and new, life in review,
Roses in the snow of long ago.
Lovely sentiments, but I had to leave him deposited there while I raced off to the mercantile, on the chance Jones might still be in there buying groceries. I couldn’t help looking wildly this way and that along the moonlit street of Wisdom, hoping that the deputy sheriff would not choose now to pay the hoboes another visit.
As I burst into the store, Jones glanced around in surprise from chucking an armload of loaves of bread onto the counter while the storekeeper kept tally. Before he could ask what my rush was, I stammered, “The fellas are ready to go back to the ranch.”
“What, they drank the town dry already? Pretty close to a new record, I’d say.” He turned away to grab boxes of macaroni off a shelf. “Tell them I’ll be there by the time they can piss the beer out of theirselves. I’m not stopping every two minutes on the way to the ranch so somebody can take a leak.”
“Uhm, if you could hurry. They’re sort of in a fight. With the Tumbling T crew.”
Jones swore blue sparks into the air, instructed the storekeeper to load the groceries in the pickup, and took off at a high run for the bar, with me trying to keep up.
“STOP IT!” he roared before he was even half through the swinging doors. “Or I’ll see to it that every one of you sonofabitches of both outfits is fired and your asses run out of town before morning!”
That put a halt to everything, except a belated “Yow!” from Peerless, who had received the latest whack from Babs’s pool stick. Sitting on Deacon’s chest, where he had him pinned to the floor, Highpockets looked down at his adversary. “Your call.”
Deacon squirmed as much as he could, very little, then managed to turn his head toward Jones. “Since you put it that way, we’re peaceable.”
“Us, too,” Highpockets agreed, climbing off him. “You heard what the man said, boys. Let’s take our winnings and evaporate out of here. Right, Skeeter?” He whirled around, looking in every corner. “SKEETER? Where the hell did he and that hatful of money go?”
The Jersey Mosquito popped up from behind the far end of the bar, grinning devilishly and holding the upside-down hat as if it were a pot of gold. “Just bein’ our Fort Knox till you fellas got done socializin’. See you on the Ma and Pa sometime, Deacon,” he called over his shoulder as he scampered out of the bar to jump in the back of the pickup.
? ? ?
FOLLOWING HIS LEAD, laughing and hooting like schoolboys, the Diamond Buckle crew piled into the box of the pickup, Jones counting us with chops of a hand like you do sheep. He came up one short. “Who’s missing?”