Call Me Tex

Vol. 115: A Western Horror Story

The Scary Songbook Collection

An Introduction- It started with a song. I was thinking about the lyrics and the images some of my favorite songs invoked, not planning anything, just considering the songs. Probably butchering them with my tone deaf singing. But that turned to thinking about the drastic change to the song’s story with just a little tinkering. How I could horrify it. ( I am what I am.) That inspiration led to a short story, and another song led to another story. Very quickly, I had a whole collection inspired by songs that usually had nothing to do with evil characters, but I blame them nonetheless. This is the first. The collection will spill out over the coming months.

Call Me Tex

Inspired by “The Switch and the Spur” by The Raconteurs

In my deeply buried past, I had been an indifferent sailor. I was born and raised in the seaport of New Bedford, among fishermen and schooners, the shivering mornings on land running into shivering afternoons on the water, even in summer. It was a life of hard work and scarred hands, of the intense scent of the docks that permeated every pore of my skin. I was taught about sailing and knots in a school that smelled of the sea. I had no love for any of it.

Instead, I wanted to be a cowboy. Sun-leathered men came through New Bedford occasionally, and they had an enamored listener in me. Word of a visitor from the West arriving to see some cousin in town would reach my ears and I would fly to meet this stranger and fawn over him as if he were Hercules. To me, anyone who owned spurs and a Western hat was a hero. I can tell you, I’ve possessed these things, and I’m no hero. You’ll believe that soon enough.

I was seventeen years old when my father had enough of me and told me to leave his house. I took this as a sign that it was time to begin my new life out West, and so I made my way through New York, and Ohio, past Illinois and Missouri, and went south to Oklahoma. I stayed there for a bit, becoming acquainted with the Southerner’s woozy way of speaking. After some weeks of working on a farm for half pay, since I had no farming experience, I had learned to ride a horse. Not well, but well enough to stay upright. My employer was a kind Christian man who needed a body for the more menial work, and that was all I was fit for then. He loaned me a set of well-worn leather chaps and battered boots that fit me as if they were made for me, and I took these with me when I lit out in the middle of the night after receiving just a few pay packets. I also took a blanket, but I knew not to steal a horse because that was a hanging offense.

I went to Texas. In my mind, that would be my paradise on Earth, the place where I would become a man in charge of my own destiny. I would work hard and grow tough, then find myself a beautiful woman to marry. She would not screech at me nor our children, unlike the fishwives of New Bedford, women with perpetually chapped red faces and narrow eyes. Best of all, I would be a real cowboy who worked my own ranch, moving my cattle into meadows and protecting everything I owned from rustlers and Indians. People all across Texas would say they had never seen the likes of me.

It turned out that Texas was flat and dry and wasn’t short on their own cowboys. It was hotter than I had ever thought the land could be. I had a terrible time finding work because there were plenty of toughened older men who knew each other and laughed at my accent. I could get only the worst work, mucking stalls all day and scrubbing the bunkhouse floors. They called me ‘Fisherman’. It took months before I was allowed around the cattle.

I did no better at getting a beautiful wife. By the time I was twenty years old I had gotten the daughter of another ranchhand in trouble and married her while her father stood four feet away with a shotgun. I knew that I’d made my own problems, but damn, I wasn’t suppose to be stuck with her for life. Gertie was twenty-two, stout and heavy-faced with a round plop of a nose that made her look piggish. She was amendable though, which is how we got into this situation. I soon turned my efforts to persuading Mr. Ryan, the ranch owner, that I could be a great cowboy, which meant being out among the horses and cattle for most of the day, and in our tiny cabin with Gertie as little as possible.

Each month, after receiving my pay packet, I’d go along with some of the other men into Rocksprings, a four mile ride from the ranch. For one night I enjoyed myself by spending a dollar at Miss Fern’s brothel. There was a blonde dove named Sarah who would entertain me for two hours while we shared half a bottle of cheap whiskey. She was my favorite because she was small and fragile looking. For those two hours a month, some very tempting ideas swirled around in my head.

It was the end of June, a wet blanket of an evening, when I walked through Miss Fern’s door this time. There were overhead fans slapping the thick air and a dark-haired fellow was strolling around playing a violin. That would’ve impressed me enough, I always became looser when I entered Miss Fern’s, though I never spent more than a buck and a half on these nights between Sarah and the liquor. I kept my household expenses and Gertie’s condition in mind, so I never lost my head no matter how drunk I was.

That is, until Rochelle appeared that evening in the front parlor and I was undone. Thinking back, I realize now that Sarah must have been in the room too, she knew I’d come that night, but I didn’t even look at another woman when I saw this dark-haired beauty with skin like milk. She stood about five feet tall and had hips almost as wide, with a cinched in little waist. Her face was like a painted porcelain doll and she possessed the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen aside from a horse. She smiled at me in a way that made me feel like she would have chosen me, given the chance, and so I nodded up and down like my head would fall off.

We went upstairs to her room. There was an overhead fan here too, and a bowl holding an enormous block of ice. It made the room cool and pleasant, and as I breathed in the perfumed air, she told me that I’d be paying her fifty cents more than I’d been paying Sarah. I told her I didn’t mind.

“I like a man who’s willin’ to pay for quality,” she breathed, before pulling out two bottles of liquor, one being my regular, the other being brandy.

“Would you like this cheap rotgut or the good stuff that I can drink too?”

You already know what I said, and instead of spending fifty cents on getting drunk, I spent two dollars. I suddenly didn’t care.

We drank and spent time together and she became the ideal picture of womanhood for me. If Thomas Edison is a genius in his field, I’d say that Rochelle excelled just as highly in hers. At some point she leaned over me to refill my glass, and out of the blue, asked me what I wanted out of life. I nearly barked with laughter.

“I want a big black and white Appaloosa,” I smiled before taking another gulp.

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’d name him Demon and we’d be best friends to the end,” I laughed.

“Go on,” she cooed, “I’m interested. What else does your heart desire?”

“I want plenty of gold and riches, of course, can’t do much without that. I want a pretty wife.”

“You’re in the market for marriage, darlin’?” she asked as she traced her finger over my chest.

“I am married. She’s an ungodly sight. And she’s turned as mean as a mule since the wedding,” I heard myself slurring, but Rochelle’s tinkling laughter made me laugh too.

“What else would you have?”

Between her real interest in me and the liquor, I was warming up to the questions.

“I want to have everything in my control, good or bad. I want to do what satisfies me.”

“Be the captain of your own destiny! That’s a good one. Anything else?”

“Well…,” I made a face like I had to think about it, but I knew what I wanted. I’d left home to get it, but I was afraid she’d laugh at me. Sharp-eyed as she was, she recognized my hesitation.

“Come on now. What’s your grandest wish?”

“Well. Now don’t laugh, but I’m going to be a famous cowboy.”

“Why would I laugh, darlin’? I believe you.”

This gave me the courage to go on. “My name will be in books.” I went delving into my soul now, telling this remarkable woman about all my desires, helped along by the brandy.

“I’m going to be so famous that even my father back East will hear of me.”

She tipped the last drops of the liquor into my glass. “How will you go about becoming so famous and rich?”

I had to consider that. My brain felt muddy.

“I’m young and I’ll do whatever I need to.”

“That’s the spirit, Tex! Do you mind if I call you Tex? I haven’t been here long and you seem like a real Texan to me. Let me ask you, Tex, would you be willing to lose your child to get all this? The Demon horse and all the other things?”

“Yes,” I said and took a drink, then wondered when I’d told her about Gertie carrying a child.

She laughed at my quick reply and I laughed too. Something about being with her just made me feel carefree.

“Would you trade your very soul for it all?” Now she was teasing, but I didn’t mind because it was her doing it.

“Yes,” I said quickly, and we both laughed like it was the funniest thing ever said.

“Let’s make that deal, Tex. I’ll wave my hand like so, and you’ll get the pretty wife, the horse, the money, the freedom to make all your own decisions!”

I laughed. “Alright, then.”

“Good. Shake my hand, cowboy.”

She stuck her hand out to me and I took it without hesitation, laughing because I’d never seen a woman ever shake hands with anybody. If our friendship had been entertaining before this conversation, it became more so for the rest of my time.

I returned to the ranch while the moon was still high, a sheen of sweat all over me from the damp heat. I slipped off Ezekiel's saddle and bit and shoved him into his stall, then went to my cabin, entering quietly. Gertie was awake and raring to go at me.

“I know what you’ve been doin’!” she hissed. “Spendin’ what little we have on whores and liquor! What kind of man have I married? What have I done?” She went on like this, blaming herself for choosing me, until finally I agreed with her.

“I don’t know how you can call someone else a whore when you’re one yourself. Now let me alone so I can sleep.”

I had been sitting on the edge of our bed pulling off my boots. Still very drunk, I tried to kick out of my pants, but failing, just stretched out with my pants around my knees.

Gertie was not done and she puffed and growled as she paced the cabin in her long nightgown. I had drifted into oblivion when she struck me in the belly with the heavy broom head. I believe I woke at the first strike, which was painfully hard, but then she continued to strike me with it over and over, the rough twigs of the head scratching me up. All I could do at first was to flail a hand out in an effort to block it. Eventually I was able to get hold and we fought over it vigorously, she standing above me while I was still in bed. I sat up and grasped the broomstick with both hands while Gertie, at least seven months along, was throwing all her weight backwards in an effort to get it from my hold. I was tired and angry. To end the fight once and for all so I could go to sleep, I yanked the stick back hard past my shoulder, but she held on, so I quickly thrust it back towards her to throw her off her balance.

I don’t know what happened. She lost her balance alright, her feet shifting out from under her. She stumbled and fell forward onto the end of the stick, impaling herself through her right eye. I shielded myself from the spray of blood by holding the blanket up, but my curiosity over what I was hearing got the better of me and I lowered the blanket to watch as she slid further down onto the broomstick, her eye seeming to dissolve as liquid and gore squeezed its way around the wood and dripped to the dirt floor. At some point I realized I was still holding the whisk end and let go, but when it hit the floor it acted like a post, standing upright and in place while Gertie slid down to the extent of her skull. She hung there, her weight fully on the broom, her arms slack. A long drawn out moan filled the cabin.

I sat there. I don’t know why, other than the sight of it kept me rooted. I could hear my own heavy panting, even over the sound of everything escaping from Gertie’s head and dripping to the ground.

After a minute or two I realized that the event was over, she was done, and I began thinking about how I could remove myself from the whole mess.

It was the middle of the night with a harvest moon and the ranch was lit up. It would have been too easy for someone in the bunkhouse or main house to have looked out their window and watched the proceedings, but I knew it very likely that I was the only conscious person on the ranch. The others either remained in town to drink away their pay or had stayed to make due with Mrs. Ryan’s homemade wine.

Gertie was pulled off the broomstick and laid down. She was dragged out the cabin and behind the barn. Then her boots and hair comb were retrieved and her boots put on her. She was propped up against the wall and her hair combed. It was neat, almost. Then a certain tool was retrieved from the tack wall in the barn.

Standing over Gertie was nearly overwhelming. She actually looked very pretty now, the way she had in those first weeks of sneaking around.

The next part is regrettable. The hoof trimmer is a wood-handled tool with a doubled over steel knife edge used for scraping and shaping animal hooves. That was pressed into her eye socket, pressed into the wound as far as it would go. It was left there with the stout handle sticking out. It was a good fit. Her nightgown was then pushed up to her thighs. The implication was obvious. This was the work of a deviant, and the blame would surely fall on Stanley. The sixteen year-old halfwit comes to the ranch twice a week to scrape out the horse’s hooves, carrying the trimmer on him all day while mooning after Gertie in the worst way. She was kind to him and look how he repaid her.

The broom was used in the cabin to swirl more dirt into the gore and make it thick, then it was swept out the door and behind the cabin. With effort, the dirt floor looked normal, then the broom was used outside all over the path she’d been dragged, sweeping and kicking the dirt around before dunking the broom in the water trough and scrubbing the handle and my hands. It was returned to the closet to dry out away from sight. The blanket was a mess with so much blood on it. Nothing could be done about that right now, but it was flipped over so the blood was laying down on the mattress.

I washed my face, neck and arms, trying to cool down. I felt the heat of the dry land radiating from inside my flesh, but I had more to do. Now would be the final part of the plan.

I saddled Ezekiel up and led him quietly back to the foot of the ranch. We re-entered, this time singing at the top of my lungs. I laughed and sang like I’d been drinking all night. I’d been drunk earlier, but I was stone-cold sober at this point, having to remind myself to slur my song. Before long, there was both Mr. and Mrs. Ryan standing on the veranda.

“Hey-o, Fisherman! Stop your caterwaulin’ and get to bed! Good Lord, your wife will have somethin’ to say to you.”

I took my hat off and waved it to my employers with a languid smile, saying, “I’m sure she will, sir. Sorry to wake you.” I had to be noted as a happy drunk.

Mr. Ryan waved me towards my cabin and they went inside. I played the fool all the way just in case they were watching. I put the horse back in his stall and staggered to my cabin door. Once I was inside by myself I slapped a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

I pulled my boots off and tossed them next to the bed, then laid down atop the blanket. I kept my clothes on, the better to look dead drunk when I’d be informed of my widower status in the morning. For now, I was exhausted and easily slipped off to sleep.

I was shaken awake. It was Jerrod, the lead and Mr. Ryan’s second, telling me that getting stinkin’ drunk was not going to keep me from work.

“I’m sorry, sir. I’ll get right to it.”

And then the events of the night came flooding over me like a storm, and I realized that Gertie had not been found yet because Jerrod would certainly not be talking to me this way if she had.

I rubbed the sleep from my face as he was walking out the door, and I said, “It’s a wonder Gertie didn’t wake me.”

“Yeah. And wash the blood off your face,” he said and slammed the door behind him, the old son of a bitch. I looked in the mirror and saw thin scratches caked with dried blood down my cheek from Gertie’s attack with the broom. The damage could surely pass for being done by fingernails.

I put on clean clothes and left last night’s crumpled on the floor, like I knew Gertie would pick them up. I put on a show of being hungover, which I was, and went to the barn to get the first bales of hay. Back and forth I went from the barn to the field, dropping bales and cutting them apart for the animals, all the while wondering how long it would take. I didn’t mind the wait.

Round ten o’ clock we were all dripping sweat and McWilliams was saying we’d better go see if any of the cattle were wounded as the thick clouds of flies was a sure sign of it. He called to Jerrod that we were going to have a look, and so we set out in the pasture and I pretended to be looking over the cattle carefully. I knew that McWilliams had now drawn Jerrod’s attention to the flies and he’d be trying to figure it out first. After fifteen minutes or so, we heard the call.

“Get the sheriff! Dear God, Mr. Ryan! Mr. Ryan!”

McWilliams and I looked at each other, then ran back to where Jerrod stood at the back corner of the barn.

“You shouldn’t look,” Jerrod said to me. “I’ll tell you now, it’s your wife.”

I’ll give myself credit, I sent up a wail and made it good. Gertie’s father came running and stood over her, and he set up a wail that was in danger of topping mine, but then I fell against him and we both went to the ground.

Mr. Ryan looked dazed and told the men to get us inside. There, in the cool darkness of the front parlor, Mrs. Ryan fed us glasses of good brandy. I sat facing the window and saw when the sheriff and two deputies rode in and tied their horses to the hitch in front of the main house. The sheriff had a beautiful Appaloosa, almost all black but freckled across the rump with white. When the three men walked towards the barn where Mr. Ryan and the others were, I looked at my father-in-law lying face down on Mrs. Ryan’s sofa, blubbering and getting drunk. As if any of that would help.

“I’m going to my cabin. I want to get a dress for Gertie,” I told him, and he nodded through his tears before throwing himself back down.

I went outside and listened. I couldn’t hear anything from the veranda beyond the general sound of voices. I considered how drunk I had been, and likely sloppy. My face was scraped up and they would ask why. It looked bad for me.

I untied the sheriff’s horse and mounted, nudging him into a gentle canter out of the ranch. Fifty yards away, I nudged him again and we headed south. I couldn’t help it, I always have an overwhelming need to get far away from my deeds. I had an idea that I could live well in Ciudad Acuna, just across the border, and maybe even come back to Rocksprings once in a while to see Rochelle.

We ran through the desert for two hours straight before stopping under a mesquite to give Demon a rest. I don’t know what the sheriff called him, but I had named him Demon and he seemed to like it. He regarded me as I shot some water from the sheriff’s water bladder onto his tongue. My throat was parched but I took just a few sips. As I poked around in the saddle bags, I was stunned to find two sugar sacks filled with gold coins. I pulled them out and ran my fingers through them. It was more money than I’d ever seen. Of course, my mind went to the previous night in the company of Rochelle. In just over fifteen hours since declaring a list of my heart’s desires, three had come true. I was rich with gold and I had Demon. I hated to admit it but I’d also had a pretty wife, and even if that was over now, I’d had her. Combing over my blurry memory, and it was like trying to stomp the mud off boots, I remembered the last wish I’d made before shaking hands with Rochelle.

We rode through the sagebrush and cactus, the heat burning. Both the horse and I were slick with sweat. There was no doubt at all that the men would have formed a posse after seeing that me and Demon were gone. I really couldn’t look any guiltier, so we needed to beat them to the border. It was a race and they’d be trying to head me off at Del Rio, putting up wanted posters all across the border towns from El Paso to Laredo, maybe even San Antonio. For a minute, I basked in the image of myself as a Texas outlaw. I wondered if the drawing on the posters would make me look mean, or more likely, if it would show me as young and baby-faced. It would also note my Massachusetts accent, embarrassingly pronounced no matter how hard I tried to jimmy it out.

We raced two more hours before I dared to let Demon rest, the horse sweating and foaming at the mouth with dehydration. I tied him to the biggest mesquite about, but it stood just high enough to clear Demon’s head. I gave the horse most of the water, taking just a mouthful for myself. It was so hot it burned going down.

I checked the bags again, knowing I hadn’t overlooked a supply of oats but hoping it would appear anyway. There was no food for me either. Just the water bladder, empty now, the gold coins, and a ten inch buck knife.

I sat down. My thoughts turned to Rochelle and our conversation. The horse. The gold. Being the captain of my own ship, a saying that reminded me of my hated New England home and my cruel father.

I had come out West to prove myself a man, and also because I knew no one in this region of the country, and that meant that no one knew me. My father didn’t understand me. He saw fault when I said that what happened to the cats didn’t matter. He looked at me with disgust after my new little step-sister died in that fall down the stairs. He had pulled me into the parlor and hissed out his suspicions, and I had tried not to smile as I defended myself, but Father had called me, his son, an aberration.

“That may be, Father, but I’m famous now,” I said out loud to the mesquites.

“Yes, you are,” a voice seconded. Rochelle stepped out from behind a saguaro. She wore the gray taffeta dress from the previous night and her hair fell in those beautiful black curls. She had such a friendly smile.

“Though your fame is just beginning, Tex. You’re going to be written up in books, just like you wanted. “The Cowboy Killer” they’ll call you. How d’ya like that?”

I was too stunned with surprise, fear, dehydration, everything, to make much of it, but I understood that Rochelle was not who I thought she was.

“By the way, your time is just about up. There’s a posse two dozen strong coming for you and they have water and food and know the way a lot better than you do. Murdering your wife might get you a jail sentence, but stealing a horse is a hanging.”

I had never wanted to be a horse thief.

“Demon won’t last much longer,” she said. “Look at him.”

The horse was in distress alright, foaming from the lips and his eyes dilated. For possibly the first time in my life, I worried about something other than myself. I was responsible for his predicament.

“Save him,” I told her. “Save him. He’s a good horse.”

“He is, and I could easily make sure he lives, but why should I?”

I considered this. What could I give?

“There’s go-”

“Don’t insult me,” she smiled.

I knew what she wanted. I didn’t want to do it, but I believed her when she said I was about done for.

“Save him and I’ll do it.”

“Shake on it?”

We clenched hands for a second, hers feeling as cold as snow. She then waved over my shoulder to have me turn and look. When I did, there was a shallow gully with a thin running stream. Beyond that was a cornfield thick with stalks, the yellow corn bursting from the husks.

“Hallelujah,” I breathed.

“Don’t say that,” she replied.

I untied Demon and slipped the bit and saddle from him. He hurried to the stream and bent his head to it.

“Now then,” she said, still smiling.

I opened the saddlebag and pulled the knife. It was double-sided, curved with serrated teeth on one side meant for sawing through tough things. I thought about stabbing at her, just one last moment of fun, but I knew it would be useless, and anyway, I don’t welch on deals.

I reared back, and in one solid motion jammed the knife up to the hilt into my right eye.

The posse arrived six hours later, finding Demon feeding in the cornfield and my desiccated body under the little mesquite tree.

Next week: The Creep Club will be high-fiving horror writer/producer/actor Larry Fessenden, who has brought us so many scares, then we’ll discuss the terrifying 1920s.

I’m screeching out to Steph K., Jade and Julie, the newest Creep Club members. I’m sure these ladies appear on a lotta security footage. So, are you creepy enough to join?