The Kean Land and Other Stories by Jack Schaefer

Author:Jack Schaefer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The unorganized town of Harmony slept in the afternoon glaze. Curtains were pulled or flour bags hung at the windows of the few houses to shut out the sun. The doors of the livery stable and the blacksmith shop and the stage station were closed for the same sensible reason. The wide porch of the combination hotel and office building served the same purpose. A blanket hung down over the one wide window of the barbershop. An innovation, an awning, shaded the front of the general store. Even three of the four saloons had the solid doors behind the swinging doors closed. Down the brief length of the main—the only recognizable—street not a twitch of movement disturbed the silence. Two freight wagons stood motionless in the street dust, their ox teams lying down under the yokes. Across the way an old farm wagon sagged over its axles, its team still and wooden, too dulled even to flick tails at flies. Harmony reigned in Harmony. And over the last rise of the rolling plain that stretched to the horizon all around and on down to the main street jogged a short-coupled pinto and a chunky gray.

“Well, lookathere,” said Monte Walsh. “One new shack and a frill on the store.”

The two knowing cowponies swung together to the tie rail in front of the one open saloon. Monte and Chet Rollins dismounted and eased cinches and stepped up across the plank sidewalk and went inside. The bartender, perched on a stool behind the bar and hunched forward on his elbows reading a newspaper, looked up and saw them coming. He reached under the bar and set out two small glasses and a plain labelless bottle half filled with a dark deadly liquid and returned to his paper.

“Not that stuff,” said Monte. “We can pay.”

The bartender turned his head to look up sideways. He waited. Monte fished in his left pants pocket and pulled out one of the dollar bills and laid it on the bar. The bartender swiveled on the stool and reached with both hands, one to take the dollar, the other to take a bottle with a bright label off the shelf behind him. He set the bottle out by the two glasses and in the same motion restored the first bottle to its place beneath the bar. He settled again on his elbows over the paper. “That’ll cover four,” he said.

Monte Walsh and Chet Rollins drained the first pair and leaned with backs against the bar surveying the interior of the saloon. An old man in too-large clothes that looked even older sat slouched on a chair near the front staring dull-eyed out the one side window at the blank wall of the next building. Farther back the two freighters from the wagons outside slept with long puffing snores by a streak-topped table. One was upright, head back, mouth open. The other was slumped forward on the table, head cradled in his arms by an empty bottle.

“Mighty lively,” murmured Monte Walsh.

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