Give-a-Damn Jones by Bill Pronzini

Author:Bill Pronzini [Pronzini, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765394408
Publisher: Forge Books
Published: 2018-05-07T21:00:00+00:00

SETH JENNISON

It was hellfire hot in the blacksmith shop, at least fifteen degrees hotter than the day outside. Patch stood banging away on a red-hot horseshoe with his five-pound sledge, drenched in sooty sweat, when I walked in. Wearing his mule-hide shoeing apron and getting ready to shoe a skewbald stallion waiting in the stall. He hammered with a vengeance, as if it was Doc Christmas’s head forked there on his anvil. The whole left side of his ugly face was swelled up something wicked, about twice the size it’d been yesterday.

He glared when he saw me. “What in hell you want, Jennison?” The words didn’t come out in a lisp as they had in the willow flat, but in a kind of snarly mumble that you had to pay close attention to understand.

“A few peaceable words, is all.”

“Got nothing to say to you. My mouth hurts too much to talk.” Then, Patch being Patch, he went ahead and jawed to me anyway. “Look at what that gawdamn tooth puller done to me. Hurts twice as bad without the tooth than it done with it in.”

“Well, you did volunteer to have it yanked.”

“I didn’t volunteer for no swole-up face like I got now. Painless dentist, hell!”

“It’s my understanding you threatened Doc Christmas and his assistant with bodily harm.”

“Run to you, did he?” Patch said. “Well, it’d serve both of ’em right if I blowed their heads off with my twelve-gauge.”

“You’d hang, Patch, and you know it.”

He tried to scowl, but it pained his face and made him wince. He gave the horseshoe another lick with his sledge, then picked it up with a pair of tongs and dropped it into a bucket of water. Watching it steam and sizzle, he said, “There’s other ways to skin a cat.”

“Meaning?”

“Just what I said. Other ways to skin a cat.”

“Patch, you listen to me. You do so much as harm a hair on Doc Christmas’s or Homer’s head, or damage that wagon of theirs, I’ll slap you in jail and see you stay locked up as long as the law allows.”

“I ain’t afraid of you, Jennison.”

“Ought to be, if you know what’s good for you.” I said it quiet, but as hard underneath as that iron horseshoe in the bucket.

“I know what’s good for me right now—some of that bastard’s painkiller. It’s the genuine article, even if he ain’t. And I aim to get me a bottle.”

“Now, that’s the first sensible thing I heard you say. Whyn’t you and me mosey on down to their wagon so’s you can buy one.”

“Buy? I ain’t gonna buy something I should’ve got for nothing.”

“Oh, Lordy, Patch. Doc Christmas never promised you a free bottle of his painkiller. All he promised was to draw your busted tooth at no charge, which he did.”

“One’s free, so’s the other,” Patch said. “Ain’t nobody cheats Elrod Patch and gets away with it. Nobody!”

Well, that was some ironical coming from the biggest cheater in Box Elder, but I didn’t say so. Just wasn’t any use trying to talk sense to the man.

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