Me and Red

They killed me on a Saturday night, in a case of mistaken identity. They got the wrong man, but they weren’t far off the mark. Of course, I was unaware of the reason, and would have been no happier had I known.

Me and Red purchased those hats from a toothless, crinkled up Mexican in a San Antonio dry goods store, but it would have been a stretch even back then to call them “new”. If it was the same old Mexican who sold them to us that had woven them, then he had done it long before, back when “las senoritas bonitas” still smiled his way.

Those hats, not being the preferred style of the day, had been sitting around in that store for so long that Red and I had to knock the dust off before trying them. The hats were similar in their styles and shapes, being hand woven by the same master, the both of them being flat-topped, with high, stove-piped crowns, and extra wide brims. They were woven from a pliable straw, strong, but lightweight. They were the kind of hats suggested to us by Chaz as being good for the Texas heat. Mine was of a darker brown, with a leather band sporting a coin baring a snarling, scratching jaguar. Red’s was lighter in color, almost white, with a braided silver band, and turquoise stones spaced around. Those hats were of a style rarely seen in Texas, and rarer yet in Kansas, which was the reason we chose them. Me and Red felt the need to stand out in this dramatic western land where everyone seemed large, and with unique personalities.

It would have been easy for someone in Abilene, someone who had never met me and Red, to assume that there could only be one such hat in town at a time, as those hats made a statement. We wore them as fighting cocks wear their crowns, our personalities adjusting to fit their jaunty appearances. When we first road into camp with our new headgear Chaz and the boys had roared their approval. For that moment we were the stars of the outfit, with everyone envious of the Tennessee gringos, and we were proud, we being the newest and youngest of the bunch. Geraldo beamed his appreciation, “Bien, amigos mios! Ahora, tienes un estilo!” It is good my friends, now you have a style!”

Yes sir. You can bet we were proud.

It was a hard two month trail up from Texas. The boys were all anxious for town, so we drew straws to see who stayed back to ride herd. Knowing my luck, I was not surprised when I drew short, but it was alright. The cattle were spooky those last twenty miles. The last thing we needed was for our two month drive to end in a stampede, with our herd scattered over half of Kansas. It was past dinner time when Chaz got back with his cattle buyers, so that when I finally headed into town I was worn down some, but still ready to make up for the lost time. I felt better after a bath, and a shave, but my lids were heavy. A beer, or a whiskey would help cut the trail dust, so I strolled through the opened doors of “The Cow-Town Palace” just as any sixteen year old with ten gallons of hat, two months of pay, and a Colt’s revolver on his hip would. I strolled in like a mucho mal hombre.

I saw it happening, although I scarcely believed it. They were spread wide across the room. Three had pistols, one a shotgun. I almost looked back, over my shoulder, thinking they must be looking for someone else, but it wasn’t so. Flame blasted me from every direction, even as my own hand grabbed iron.

Red had the disposition of a side-kick, rather than that of a hero. He just wasn’t suited to play a great part in life’s play. When we left Millington Red’s mother assigned me the task of keeping Red from harm, a responsibility I accepted, as I had been doing it for most of our lives already. Red was tough enough, and he was smart enough, but he didn’t always think things through, especially when the pressure was cooking. Red’s initial reaction to any surprise was anger. That hot fuse had a way of pushing him to the front of situations that he had no business being in at all, much less being out in front of. That’s where me and Red found ourselves now, right up front of a bad situation.

Red had been gambling in “The Palace” an hour before I arrived. He was gambling sober, as he was still the preacher’s son. Red wasn’t sure, but he thought he caught the whisper from a bottom deal. Red being Red, he continued to play, cautiously, his bets low, waiting and watching for a skunk. It was not long before he heard it again, and he smelled the skunk. Red was young, only sixteen years. He had the look of a youngster, what with his fiery red hair and freckled cheeks, but that youngster was game! Red called a man twice his size and thrice his age, a “no good, four-flushing, sum bitch!” When he did, the “stooges” placed on either side of Red grabbed his arms, holding tight while “Big” Jim Allard gave it to him good with both fists. Beaten to a bloody pulp, Red was thrown without ceremony into the dry arroyo behind Main Street.

Me and Red were partners. We had been partners since we were school kids back in Tennessee. We became partners because we had both caught the “Western Itch”, a problematic infection of the time period. When Greely said, “Go West, Young Man”, he was talking straight at me and Red. We had missed the war, being too young, but we had no intention of missing out on the great western adventure, too.

Red came by his nick-name honest. His hair shone cinnamon-tit red, while his temper glowed hot as a stove top. His real name was Terrance Applewhite, a rather humorous mistake of identity if you think about it. Red’s father was the preacher at the Millington First Baptist Church. Everything wild ever said about a preacher’s son came tied up in Terrance with a “Red” ribboned bow.

Me and Red were fifteen years old when we hooked on with Joseph McCoy, making him believe we were sixteen. McCoy put us on a steamer bound for Houston. We stepped off of that steamer and into our dreams. It’s true what they say, that everything is bigger in Texas. The men were tough, and the women beautiful. The work was tough, but we were game, me an Red. Chaz, our segundo, took us under his wing. A real vaquero, Chaz Valero was a brush-popper. Chaz worked the heaviest Texas thickets along the hottest border country, driving wild longhorns out of the thorny bushes two and three at a time. Once me and Red worked up the courage to try it ourselves and discovered just how hard it really was, Chaz Valero grew to “Texas Size” in our eyes.

At the start the cattle were chasing me and Red out of the thickets, instead of the other way around, but we lived, and we learned. We listened to Chaz, and to Geraldo Velasquez, his partner, around chuck at night. We told them what we had run into during the day, and they told us how to handle it the next time. In between the scratches, the falls, and the heat we got better, and we got wiser. Soon we were chasing those wild longhorns ourselves, instead of them chasing us, and not without some pride. We were working our asses off, but we were being treated like men, and we were being paid like men... and we were loving every minute.

One thing about Red, he didn’t mind the work. In fact, the harder the work, the more dangerous it got, the more Red took to it. Geraldo Velasquez pulled us aside one evening on the way to chuck, pointing out a thicket,“Avoid dat thicket, senors. El Diablo, he leeve in dat one. El Diablo es two-thousand pound, with a broken horn, just so.” Velasquez made a hand gesture to show how the horn had been snapped off. “If you see that bull, mis amigos, go another way. No es bueno. There is better work elsewhere.”

The morning after that talk Red rode straight into El Diablo’s thicket. We could hear the roars of angry cattle, and the “Sum Bitches,” from Red amidst the sounds of crashing brush. We waited anxiously, certain that Red would come out fast, hell-for-leather, but that ain’t what happened. Instead, Red came out of that Devil’s Den pushing El Diablio himself, along with a twelve cow harem! We fell in on his flanks, and together we drove Red’s little herd to the holding area.

“What in the hell, Red,” Chaz asked? “How did you do that? Why did you do that?”

“There was cows in them bottoms. McCoy is paying me to gather cows.”

And that was that!

After two weeks of the hellishly hot work, Chaz, Geraldo,Red and I had slightly over three hundred head of the biggest, meanest cow-critturs created on Earth. When we met up with Clay Peterson and his boys, all together we tallied seven hundred and fifty, bristling mean, Texas longhorn cattle.

El Diablo took the lead, the herd following naturally. Without him to guide the herd we might have never made Kansas. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a job holding that herd together. Anything that startled them cows would set them off to running, and usually in the wrong direction. Our enemies were thunder, wolves, panthers, and Comanches, but something as simple as a pan clanking in the chuck wagon could start them skitterish cows to running. We lived on a nervous edge for eight hundred miles. Me and Red had found a sure fire way to become men in a hurry, but that suited us fine. After all, being men was what we longed to be.

There was a time on that first trip to Kansas when I topped a rise to find Red faced up with three cowboys. I kicked up a trot, having an eye for trouble. Me and that chestnut horse were twenty yards away when I heard it, “You sum bitches!”

When guns were drawn, I slapped spurs. That chestnut horse sailed into trouble belly to the ground and dirt flying, with my Colt’s spouting flame from his back. One of those boys went down hard, and the other two kicked dust away from there. I turned back to Red, who was still fighting to get his gun out of its holster. Red had not removed the thong that held the pistol in its place. That thong was a necessary thing in that brush country we were working. If you expected to keep your gun for any amount of time you had to have it, but it was death for the man who did not unhook it when trouble came along.

“Damn it, Red! What goes on here?”

“It was that sum bitch Spinner Rap!” Red was sputtering with excitement. “He said they were going to cut a third of our herd! Said we had their brands in our bunch. I told the sum bitch to go right to hell, he wasn’t taking any of those cows lest he took me first!”

“Yea, Red! Jesus Christ! Next time take the thong off your pistol before you say something like that!”

Red looked down with sheepish eyes, his Colt still strapped in. His face crinkled red with rage. “Sum bitch! Lucky damned bastards is what they are!”

I looked down at the dead man, at the man I had killed. Red was wrong. That man had run plumb out of luck. A man dead who was surely a “son”, if not a “bitch”.

Red Applewhite pulled himself up, and out of the arroyo. One eye was swollen shut. His nose was likely broken. Some sorry sum bitch had kicked his balls, leaving them tender, and swollen. Red’s only thought at the moment was to find his partner, and to go back after them sum bitches. The livery stable was dark when he got there. He scratched a match on his jeans, found the lamp, and waited while it gathered fuel enough to cast its feeble glow. While waiting he saw the body stretched out on the floor of the barn. A cold fear touched Red’s neck. He knew before he looked, but he held the lamp low anyways, the better to see the face. There was a hole through the cheek, but there was no mistaking Billy Winston, his partner and friend.

“Sum Bitch!” Red’s lips curled down into a heavy frown. He allowed himself some deep breaths as he thought his way forward to the conclusion. “This is it then, Billy.” Red spoke softly in respect for his friend. “This is it.” That decided, there was no reason to wait.

Red Applewhite was no gunfighter, but neither was he a coward. He pulled his Colt to check its loads.

Billy was dead because he had not been there to meet him. Red was not there when his partner needed him the most. Something would have to be done about that.

Red’s hat was gone. It was probably lost when those sum bitches were kicking his ass. He reckoned he would amble on over to find it. It was his hat, and it was a good one. If anybody got in his way, well... damn them. Strong words for a preacher’s son. His tussle of bright red hair stood at nervous attention as he crossed the heavily rutted Abilene Main Street, the blood from his earlier beating still dripping in thick globs from his smashed lips. Red’s left eye was swollen shut, but there was nothing wrong with his right, and one would do. A man sitting on the porch of “The Palace” saw him coming. The man eased up from his bench and ducked inside.

“Sum bitch! They would be ready for him!” Well, that was alright, Red was ready too, almost. He reached down to slip the thong from the hammer of his Colt. It seemed that Billy was still with him. He smiled grimly at that comfortable thought, and he threw his remaining fear aside. Billy was with him.

Three long strides carried Red Applewhite into “The Cowtown Palace Saloon and Gambling Hall”. He stopped, pistol in hand. For all intents and purposes he felt pretty dog-gone good. His blood was pumping freely through his veins, carrying a healthy dose of adrenaline along with it. Had Red looked down, he would have seem the stains, still damp, where his friend’s life had pumped from his body, but there was no looking down. Red’s attention was needed elsewhere. The four men were spread wide through the room, their tension sparking it with electricity. It was the same four from earlier in the night. “Good.” A barely audible, “sum bitch”, leaked from Red’s smashed lips as he took another step forward, and opened the ball. He raised the big Walker’s Colt. For the first time in his life Red fired a gun at a man, at the man on his far right, at Big Jim Allard. When he did, the room exploded with sound. The first bullet that hit Red spun him sideways, allowing the next two to miss. That was the good news. When Red stopped spinning he faced the man on the far left. He snapped a quick shot at that one. This one was slender, with a yellow tie, and an inlaid pearl stick-pin. It was funny to notice that now. Red had the satisfaction of watching “Stick Pin” fall before the shotgun blast knocked him back to the wall. The fancy looking man with the shotgun was pumping it for another shot when Red sent two bullets into his chest, the bullets kissing crimson flowers upon the man’s washed and pressed, go-to-meeting shirt.

He had done for three of the sum bitches! Red leaned heavily against the wall behind him, allowing it to hold him up on his feet. “Damn,” he thought. “If only Billy could see me now!” Red knew that he was dying, but there was no pain. In fact, it felt kind of good, bringing with it a numb, care-free feeling. He lifted the Colt toward the last man standing.

The last man standing had been waiting for this. He had killed before, and he relished neither the killing itself, nor the haunting dreams that followed. Not being a man to “notch” his killings, he was under no compulsion to shoot the ruddy-faced youngster down, and so he had held back, hoping one of the others might do it first, but now it had come time to kill, or to be killed. Reluctantly, this man sent his own .44 slug into the base of Red’s throat. Red’s hand tightened on his Colt, sending its bullet slamming into the rough-planked floor. Red wanted to raise the Colt, to aim it at the sum bitch that had killed Billy, but his arm would not respond. Instead Red Applewhite slid further down the wall, alive, but choking on his own blood, the room darkening around him.

From habits created by his chosen profession, Desmond Sampson replaced the spent cartridges in his pistol before moving. When through with the task he walked over to the body of the red-headed boy propped against the wall. Desmond counted five bullet holes, and he could see where the shotgun’s blast had entered the youngster’s stomach. The boy looked like a good kid, and he had been tough, leaving the bodies of three sure enough tough men scattered about the floor of the gambling hall. “This son-of-a-bitch had sand,” Desmond thought unknowingly, offering up a compliment that Red would have appreciated, could he have heard it.

Chaz and the boys brought us out to the banks of the Smoky Hill River. They put us up high, to avoid the floodwaters, in a spot where the wildflowers mixed with the prairie grass. They wrapped us up in a single blanket, and rolled us into our hole. Chaz said some nice Mexican words that swirled away to nothing in the warm prairie wind. It was a good spot. Me and Red became a part of the western lands we had dreamed of, a part of the lands we had worked in, and loved. We were a quickly forgotten part, but a part, none-the-less.

Red Applewhite had no business being the hero. He was born to be the sidekick, but no one ever bothered to explain that to Red, so he took on both hats down there in Abilene, and he wore them both well.

A wise man has said that, “He travels the fastest who travels alone.” That might be true. Some also believe that a man is destined to be born alone, and to die alone. That might also be so. But me and Red covered some ground together back in the day, and we strolled up to those Golden Gates as only young men with ten gallons of hat, two months of pay, and a Walker’s Colt can. We strode up together, partners to the end, and ready for whatever came next, both of us stronger for the man standing beside him.