Regulator, Chapter 2

"But every ointment has its fly..."

In the first chapter of Frank Spring’s debut novel, Regulator, Tim Masterson and Collum Geary decided to stay a little longer than normal. After all, what harm was there in playing a little more poker before the boat job?

OK, let’s get to it. Chapter 2 of Regulator…

by Frank Spring

But every ointment has its fly, and the fly in this case sat across from Collum and next to Tim at the poker table. He was a dark-haired and bearded roughneck, either tanned from the sun or naturally so, perhaps Mediterranean by extraction, not that Collum particularly gave a damn. The roughneck would normally have been the kind of player Collum and Tim liked - good enough to stay at the table and keep attention off of them, not skilled or lucky or bold enough to threaten their profit margin or identify their racket and make trouble about it. 

Everything else being equal, he was so handy that they might have actually paid to keep his ass around, but the unpleasant fact was that he quite obviously loved the sound of his own voice and hadn’t the mother wit to realize that he was absolutely alone in doing so.

This was all the more galling now because his prattle had initially been an odd sort of relief. It never failed that at every table there was at least one player who, on hearing Collum’s accent, could not wait to quiz him about where in Ireland he was from, to ask if he knew Molly or Seamus or Jesus knew who else, as if the entire blighted island were one small village whose expatriated children yearned for nothing so much as to talk about it and its wretched denizens to the exclusion of all else. 

In his fairer moments, Collum was forced to admit that there might actually be some truth in that, but he tried to lie down until such feelings passed.

So it had seemed a welcome respite to play with someone whose only questions were rhetorical devices to advance his own stories - “you ever lay with a Shawnee lady? Well, let me tell you” - and who never let anyone else get a word in edgewise. But the boy - boy indeed; under the beard and dirt and grease the roughneck was north of thirty, but he was so eager, so voluble and oblivious that Geary couldn’t conceive of him as anything other than a noisy adolescent - just would not shut the hell up.  Which wore on a man.

Collum was not best pleased with the hours of prattle and repeated anecdotes, but he could bear it; loquacious fools were not unknown in Ireland, and America produced them as if it were a national mission. What worried him was Tim, whose patience, particularly on little sleep and a great deal of whiskey, would not have recommended him anywhere. 

There were troubling signs from that side of the table, where Tim was beginning to emit a series of sounds that reminded Collum of a particularly trying night when, as he attempted to pry open a gunsmith’s strongbox, what he had taken for distant thunder turned out to be the growing ire of a bullmastiff which burst in upon him and precipitated an unpleasant encounter that marked both him and the mastiff very deeply indeed.

Emerging from the memory with a slight shudder, Geary saw that the roughneck was, again, in the midst of an anecdote.

“And when we delivered that herd, we was right near that old boy as had done us out of our wages the year before, and so we rode on over and called his ass out. James Conklin, we said - and I’ll say it here, I don’t care who knows the name of that damned thief - you come out of that house and pay us what you owe,’ the roughneck said, his eyes fixed on the ceiling as if declaiming his tale to the heavens. ‘And he come out, alright - him and a damn Winchester repeater, which he’s lighting off this way and that, not necessarily for to kill us, you understand, but mainly by way of making his point, which we could not but admit was well-expressed.”

Here he paused to receive the general support and acclaim this dramatic moment required.The two more recently arrived gamblers who rounded out the five-sided game ignored the roughneck with a pointedness from which a smart man would have drawn a lesson and quickly, and Tim was staring with such naked hostility that that same hypothetical smart man would have risen from the table and run. 

None of this deterred the roughneck.

“So we let him run us off, but you see, not really. We just went off back behind the ridge, and waited, and then, hoo boy…”

Here the roughneck burst into crowing laughter and Tim’s face darkened. From a purely human perspective Geary did not much care at this point if Tim cracked the roughneck like a nut, but they had a decent arrangement going and bludgeonings had a way of attracting attention.  

“And then you rode back that night,” Geary said, “and took all the animals this man Conklin had, even down to a puppy dog, which you put across the pommel of your saddle, and gave to the young son of the rancher who was presently employing you.”

The roughneck looked perplexed; Tim halted, still in his chair.

“And the young lad’s older sister,” Geary continued with deliberate nonchalance, “so appreciated your kindness to the boy, and no doubt being already taken with your person, proceeded to desport herself with you in a variety of ways which honestly do not, do not require enumeration here. But alas! your employer found out and you were obliged to flee from Texas, where I am sure your absence is lamented to this very day.”

The roughneck smiled dimly. “I told this one before?”

“You have.”

The roughneck cast around the table, surprised by the round of exasperated nods and Tim’s muttered “like a damn idiot.”

“Well, shit, boys, I had no idea,” said the roughneck with a vacant grin. “If I thought I was oppressing you with my reconteuring, I’d have hauled my freight long since.”

“Not at all,” said Geary. “It was a story worth telling. Once,” he appended, and as if signing on to a treaty, everyone at the table nodded solemnly, and the game resumed. 

“Sorry, boys,” said the roughneck after they’d ante’d. “I was just trying to liven things up a little bit.” 

The other gamblers were stiff and silent, as if the roughneck were an annoyingly chatty bear before which they were desperately playing dead. 

“If I may say, meaning no disrespect, y’all are not what I’d call particularly lively company. Goddamn funereal sonsofbitches, I’d call you. No offense meant, of course.”

Tim’s hand flexed and for a moment it looked like he might crush the deck of cards, but he mastered the impulse and raised his eyes, intent and hooded, to the table. “Draw?”

Before they could answer, the roughneck leaned over and jabbed Tim with this elbow. “I did tell you the one about the Shawnee lady, though, right?”

Tim Masterson was surprisingly light on his feet for a big man, as everyone present discovered when he hauled the roughneck out of his chair, threw him bodily into the saloon’s rough-hewn bar, and advanced on his fallen prey with a stream of invectives and every apparent intention of getting down to some real and serious violence. 

Geary was on his feet. “Easy now, Tim,” he said in the firm but placating tones of a man attempting to calm a horse. “What’re we doing here, now? What’re we doing?”

“What we’re doing,” said Tim, “is beating this mouthy sonofabitch until he stops twitching.”

“That’s as may be,” spoke up the barman, “but you ain’t doing it here,” and the barrels of his shotgun silently agreed. 

“No disrespect,” the man continued affably as Tim stopped for a moment to contemplate the prospect of a load of buckshot, “but short-handed as we are, it’d be me as had to clean up the mess and, well, I’d rather not.”

“What do you think you’ll have to do if you cut me in half with that thing?” Tim asked.

“Fair, but that will have been my choice,” said the barman, and Tim, unable to find a hole in this logic, subsided. The barman set down his shotgun and added helpfully: “You’re welcome to kill him out back by the pisser.”

“I have a different suggestion,” said the roughneck from amongst the sawdust. Tim kicked him, but anyone could see his heart wasn’t in it, and he allowed Geary to gently lead him away from the bar.

“I’m sorry, Collum,” said Tim, looking more surprised than anything. “I just-“

“Nothing to be sorry for. Boy was asking for it, and lookit, it’s been a long one, aye. You alright, Tim? You tired? Hungry?” This approach rarely failed Geary when dealing with large, angry creatures - if he’d only had a beefsteak, he and that bullmastiff would have gotten on famously - and it didn’t fail him now. Tim raised his eyes hopefully. Geary patted him gently on the shoulder and turned to address the gamblers across the wreckage of the game.

“Gentlemen, we’re sorry for the interruption. What say we take a few moments to collect ourselves and get things in order, while my friend here steps out to order us some smoked mutton from down the way? And of course for you, too, sir” (this last to the barman) “is that fair enough?”

One of the gamblers pointed to the shallow pool of poker chips on the floor. “How do you intend to make sense of this?” he demanded.

“I’ve a pretty fair notion of everyone’s stack,” said Geary with what he hoped was a winning smile. “As for the exact amounts, well, you seem like honest men.” 

It may be that there were gamblers of that era who would have turned down such an explicit opportunity for a little light grift, even accompanied by smoked mutton, but none of them were in attendance that day. The gamblers looked at each other, shrugged, and hoisted the table to its feet.

“What about you, shitass?” Tim said to the floor. “You want some smoked mutton?’

“Yes, please,” wheezed the crumpled figure.

Check out Frank Spring’s previous contributions to The Experiment which include “Neither Gone Nor Forgotten,” “Oh, DaveBro,” and “In Praise of Gold Leaf.” For legal reasons, I want to make clear that Frank Spring owns the rights to Regulator, free and clear. Follow him on Twitter at @frankspring.

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