Killing Mr. Sunday
Bill Brooks
Jake Horn was on the dodge for a crime he didn't commit when the town of Sweet Sorrow took him in and rewarded him with a badge he didn't want. Still, this out-of-the-way Dakota hellhole is a good place for a man to get lost in.
For Jessica and Johnny Flores,
offspring of the Gods . . .
1
Roy Bean was mixing a cocktail of his own
concoction—something he referred to as Mexican
Widow—and prognosticating the changing seasons.
“The wooly worms is black as a smashed thumb,
and the chickens are all molting, and the spiders’ webs
is thick as twine. Boys, it is going to be a bad winter
that befalls us, and I for one am heading back south be-
fore it does.”
This came as a major surprise to the men drinking
with Roy Bean in the Three Aces. Roy Bean had ar-
rived in town that previous spring and established
himself as somewhat Sweet Sorrow’s honorary mayor
and jurist. He had been instrumental in forming a
town committee made up of more than saloon owners
and whores to set the wheels to civilization in motion
once the old crowd had been swept out in a hail of
bullets, namely two lawmen of bad reputations.
One of the bullet deliverers was standing at the far
end of the oak sipping coffee—Jake Horn. Jake had
killed the previous city police, had shot them fore and
aft with the help of a half-breed Mandan Frenchman
named Toussaint Trueblood. The two police that Jake
and Toussaint had put under the sod were Bob Olive
and his deputy Teacup Smith, a pair of corrupt souls
who, when not riding roughshod over the locals, were
off in other counties performing as robbers of banks,
individuals, and almost anything that moved that
looked like it had a dollar attached to it.
Jake hadn’t shot them for no reason, as they had
done him when they first came upon him. Shot and
robbed him and left him for dead. But dead didn’t
work out as they’d planned it and Toussaint True-
blood had found the man and brought him into Sweet
Sorrow figuring the white people there would be de-
cent enough to bury one of their own at the very least.
But Jake survived his wounds and as things most
sometimes happen in such dire circumstances, came
round full circle and justice was served in its own pe-
culiar way—frontier justice.
What most didn’t know, but what Roy Bean and
Toussaint Trueblood suspected, was that Jake Horn
wasn’t exactly as he represented himself. And indeed,
he wasn’t. Other circumstances, or some might call it
fate, had arrived him in Sweet Sorrow. Fate being in
the form of a conniving woman named Celine Shaw,
whom Jake—or as he was known as then, Tristan
Shade, physician—was in love with. The problem was
that the lady in question was married—something
that caused Jake, né Tristan Shade, to go against his
Hippocratic oath and violate even his personal ethics.
He fell fool for her, and in the end he paid the price of
most such fools. It was she who pulled the trigger on
her husband and blamed Jake for it. And it was he
who ended up running for his life, not her. The alias
was that of a now-late uncle whom Jake was bound to
hide out with way up in Canada. Bob Olive and
Teacup Smith put a change in his plans. And some
would say, he put a change in theirs also.
The irony of all this was that having rubbed out the
duo, Jake was induced to take over the dead men’s job.
He was reluctant to stick around and eager still to make
the border. But eventually he succumbed to the fast-
talking Roy Bean, who in spite of his bombast tended
to make sense half the time, like when he suggested that
Jake might be better hid in plain sight, as a lawman. “If,
indeed there are those looking for you for something
you may or may not have did in other climes,” as Roy
delicately put it.
Jake let his beard and hair grow and with a new
name and wearing a badge and residing in such a far-
flung frontier town as Sweet Sorrow, it seemed at
least possible he might avoid detection by either fed-
the dead man might hire. Thus far it had worked out
pretty fair.
He listened with only mild interest as Roy Bean
now went on about what a bad winter was coming.
“Snow will come so deep one Indian standing on
the shoulders of another will be buried up to his hat.
Men’s limbs will bust off from the cold. You won’t be
able to take a piss without it freezing to the end of
your whistle. I’ve heard tales of horrors from cow-
boys who survived and made it to Texas. Most
claimed they’d never winter again in the Dakotas.”
Such predictions were hard to believe, for the cur-
rent weather was quite balmy after the previous
month of September being little more than cold rain
and several ice storms. Indian summer the locals
called it. Best enjoy it while you can.
“No sir, I’m heading back down to Texas, to my
Maria and my lovely brats, all five or six of them . . .”
Roy paused in his oratory only long enough to add
a bit more gin to his Mexican Widow, tasted it and
then smacked his lips in approval.
“What’s in that box?” Tall John the undertaker
said, nodding at the small leather-strapped box one of
Roy’s feet rested upon.
“My worldly possessions,” he replied. “Every-
thing I own is in that grip: two striped shirts, a pair of
checkered trousers, bone-handled razor, cigar box full
of Indian Head pennies I’ve been saving for my
youngsters, and Mr. Blackstone’s law book. Might
even be a Bible in there as well, I can’t remember
rightly if there is or not.”
“Who will be mayor, and who the judge with you
gone?” Otis Dollar, the merchant asked.
“Why, Otis, you can be mayor, and Tall John, you
can be the judge.”
“Don’t know nothing about the law,” Tall John
said. “All I know about is the dead.”
“Sometimes you have to judge when a man is to
live and when he is to die,” Roy Bean said. Ten o’-
clock and already half in his cups and beginning to
sound profound.
“I could be mayor easily enough,” Otis said, ad-
miring the idea in his head.
“You boys could flip a dime and decide who’s who
and what’s to be what. I hate to leave you high and dry
like this, but I got a letter from my Maria just yester-
day and it was writ in her usual Mexican jibberish—
which I ain’t yet learned to decipher, but it seemed
to
me by its brevity that she is highly put out with me,
and I’m afraid if I don’t return to her soon she’ll leave
me for some vaquero down there on the pampas and
take my brats with her. I admire them kids, I truly do
and would hate to see them end up in some poor ca-
ballero’s hovel eating nothing but frijoles and fry
bread and being worked like mules.”
Roy sidled down to where Jake stood, Jake in the
middle of a personal reverie about the woman who
had done him wrong; odd thing was, he was thinking,
he still loved her. What is it gets into a man’s head and
his heart would make him still love a woman who’d
betrayed him in the worst way, he wondered. He
didn’t know. I had the answer to that one, I’d be the
smartest man alive and there is no such thing.
“Can I mix you one of these Mexican Widows?”
Roy Bean said. His eyes glittered like a dance hall
girl’s who’d put too many drops of belladonna in
them.
“No, too early of the day for me, Judge.”
“How you settling in, son?”
“Other than that original business,” Jake said, re-
ferring to the shootings of primarily Bob Olive and
Deputy Smith, “it’s been something of a cakewalk.”
“Ain’t that what I told you it would be, easy as
herding dogs.”
“You did.”
“Town like this, you don’t get too many bad actors.
Bad actors all tend to drift toward the big cities and the
places like that where there is more mischief to be had.
Sweet Sorrow ain’t nowhere near any of them in the
mischief department—might not ever be and the town
might be the better for it if it never gets as cosmopoli-
tan. Still, I will admit, that once in a great while or so,
bad actors—like old Bob and Teacup and some of
them others, tend to find out even far-flung places like
this . . .”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Roy Bean leaned in close so none of the others
might hear.
“It’s been nearly five months now and if they was
sending anybody else after you, don’t you think
they’d come by now?”
Without admitting to anything, Jake said, “The
world is full of surprises; I’ve always felt it better to
be prepared for the worst.”
“These folks here’d back you, I do believe, no mat-
ter what it is you may have done in the past. Being
here, doing what you do for them. And I don’t mean
just jailing the drunks and breaking up fisticuffs, I’m
talking about how you doctor them, too . . .”
Jake waved his hand.
“I don’t doctor them,” he said. “I just help like
anybody would with what little I know.”
“Okay, we’re clear on that. But whatever it is
you’re doing for them, they appreciate it and I don’t
think they’d just stand by and let some yahoo ride in
here and spirit you away without putting up a fuss
and a fight.”
“Maybe so,” Jake said. “But the way I look at it,
why bring trouble down on them that don’t deserve it.”
Roy tossed back the rest of his cocktail, took a fore-
finger and swiped it inside the glass and sucked the
taste off.
“Who knows,” he said, “maybe I’ll make it back
up this way some time or other if things don’t work
out in Texas, bring Maria and them brats with me,
and become a settled-down man. I could get a bear
coat and wear it and not go out when the weather
turns freezing . . .”
“Maybe,” Jake said.
The two men walked to the double doors together,
Roy carrying his grip under his arm. It was snowing.
“Look it,” Roy said. “Ain’t it what I said? Early
snow, just a foretaste of things to come. You’ll see.”
It was hardly a real snow; just a few flakes tum-
bling from a gray sky that reminded them of an old
rumpled blanket.
“Taste that air,” Roy said. “Like the taste of a
metal pail: cold and hard. Them wooly worms was
right, and so were them chickens and spiders. Crea-
tures know things humans can’t. The geese has all
flown south and I intend to be flying south, too. Stick
my feet in the Rio Grande and wash my hair in it, too.
I miss my sweet Maria, that plump brown body of
hers and all it offers a man. I even miss my brats a lit-
tle, Octavio and them.”
Jake walked across the street with Roy Bean, to
the front of Otis Dollar’s mercantile where the noon
stage would stop. Otis’s wife was out front standing
under the overhang watching it snow. Her pinched
face was nearly hidden by the poke bonnet. She wore
a dark blue capote around her shoulders. What they
could see of her eyes showed a contempt for the
weather.
“Morning, Missus Dollar,” Roy Bean said touch-
ing the brim of his broad sombrero. She could see he
was about drunk, the way he walked uncertain. She
did not care for the man, and made no pretenses that
she did. She looked at him, then went back to looking
at the falling snow.
“Now you don’t have to wonder why Otis is as
nervous as a whipped mule,” Roy Bean said softly
and out of earshot he hoped of the woman. “Otis
needs to take charge of that, set her to right thinking
again or else he’s going to live out whatever life he has
left in him feeling like every day somebody’s hammer-
ing his brains out.”
It was while waiting for the stage that they spotted
the Swede’s woman riding atop the rickety seat of a
weather-beaten buckboard whose sides rattled with
every turn of the wheels. The rig was pulled by a
sorrowful-looking old animal whose hipbones slid
back and forth under its motley hide as it walked.
“That’s that Swede’s woman, ain’t it?” Roy said.
“One whose daughter was fooling with Toussaint’s
boy when that wild kid shot him to pieces?”
“Inge Kunckle,” Jake said. He’d been with Tous-
saint the day they’d found his son shot dead and lying
in grass whose stems were blood splattered. The girl,
Gerthe Kunckle, had been taken by the boy after the
shooting. Jake and Toussaint had caught up with
them a short time later and took him and her under
their command. Toussaint’s ex-wife, Karen Sun-
flower, had suffered the news hard.
“Wonder why she’s alone and not with that man
and them brood of kids?” Roy wondered aloud,
watching the woman steer her wagon toward them.
She seemed to know right where she wanted to go,
and stopped there in the street dead in front of them.
“I like to speak to you, Marshal.”
Jake walked over, placed a hand atop the wheel.
“What is it?”
“My Gerthe,” she said.
“What about her?”
“I think maybe she’s dying.”
“I’m not a doctor, you understand.”
She nodded.
“I think maybe she’s passed a child out of her.”
“You mean she aborted?”
“Just a little bloody thing you can’t tell nothing
much about. I wrapped it in a towel and buried it, but
Gerthe, she’s still bleeding. All her color is gone. She
don’t eat. I think maybe another day or two and I
have to bury her, too.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Jake said, telling her to turn
her wagon around and head back.
She did so without another word.
“What’s shaking?” Roy said.
“I’ve got to go,” Jake said.
“You be careful around that old man,” Roy said.
“Some say he’s crazy as a bedbug. I don’t know it to
be true, but if enough say a thing about a person, you
can pretty much bet there’s some truth to it in there
somewhere.”
“Have a good trip back to Texas,” Jake said. They
shook hands and parted ways, both men believing
they’d never see the other again, but without any real
sentiment, either.
Jake got the medical bag, property of the late Doc
Willis. Until another physician decided to settle in
Sweet Sorrow, Jake figured to make use of Doc’s med-
icines and equipment. The house Doc lived in stood
vacant, waiting to be sold, but nobody in Sweet Sor-
row could afford such a manse, and so it stood, fully
furnished down to its red drapes and French furni-
ture, and a treatment room for patients, waiting for
new ownership. As the town’s lawman, Jake held the
keys to the place and used it when necessary, like the
time he had to remove a hacksaw blade from Dice
Thompson’s gullet—Dice, stone-eyed drunk, made a
bet he could swallow the thing for he’d seen a man in
a circus once swallow a sword, two of them in fact,
but it became stuck in his windpipe and he could nei-
ther swallow it or expectorate it.
Jake had some of the men carry Dice over to Doc’s
and put him on the examine table where Jake chloro-
formed him and finally got the blade removed. Dice
still had a raspy voice. It was that sort of thing that
brought folks to Jake. He’d had to make up lies about
his skills—telling them he wasn’t a real doctor, just
somebody who’d learned a little something as an or-