Rueful Regret Read online

  RUEFUL

  REGRET

  By

  Steve Vernon

  A GOTHIC WESTERN

  STARK RAVEN PRESS

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Rueful Regret

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 – Nothing beats the crowd-clearing pattern of a well-made eight gauge shotgun blast

  Chapter 2 – A Coffin Full Of Memories

  Chapter 3 – Pig Riding Triple Damn

  Chapter 4 – A Breath Taking View and Quiet Neighbors

  Chapter 5 – Cold Beans is Better than No Beans at All

  Chapter 6 – Open Your Hymn Books, Please

  Chapter 7 – The Sacred Art of Farting Around

  Chapter 8 – The Difference Between On and In

  Chapter 9 – Some Kind of Soft Yellow Rope

  Chapter 10 – The rut of memory, the dance of regret

  Chapter 11 – Missing Itch

  Chapter 12 – The Toughest Man In The Whole Damn World

  Chapter 13 – Still Kicking

  Chapter 14 – The Song of the Maggots

  Chapter 15 – Sliding Away Into the Peyote Darkness

  Chapter 16 – Talking to God

  Chapter 17 – Dig With The Nails God Gave You

  Chapter 18 – Not All Of The Maggots In Nebraska

  Chapter 19 – An Angel’s Benediction Misplaced

  Also By Steve Vernon

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  Further Reading: A Hat Full of Stories: Three Weird West Tales

  Also By Steve Vernon

  RUEFUL REGRET

  Author: Steve Vernon

  ISBN-13: 978-1-927765-15-9

  First Printing – September 8, 2013

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher and author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-person web sites or their content.

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  If you can read this novella without cracking a grin you ought to run and see a dentist – because your mouth must be seriously broken.

  What People Are Saying About Steve Vernon

  "If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub, and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon." – Bookgasm

  "Steve Vernon is something of an anomaly in the world of horror literature. He's one of the freshest new voices in the genre although his career has spanned twenty years. Writing with a rare swagger and confidence, Steve Vernon can lead his readers through an entire gamut of emotions from outright fear and repulsion to pity and laughter." - Cemetery Dance

  "Armed with a bizarre sense of humor, a huge amount of originality, a flair for taking risks and a strong grasp of characterization - Steve's got the chops for sure." - Dark Discoveries

  “Steve Vernon is a hard writer to pin down. And that’s a good thing.” – Dark Scribe Magazine

  "This genre needs new blood and Steve Vernon is quite a transfusion." –Edward Lee, author of FLESH GOTHIC and CITY INFERNAL

  “Steve Vernon is one of the finest new talents of horror and dark fiction" - Owl Goingback, author of CROTA

  "Steve Vernon was born to write. He's the real deal and we're lucky to have him." - Richard Chizmar

  Introduction

  Let me tell you just a little bit about this novella.

  A very LONG time ago I wrote a short novella entitled Long Horn, Big Shaggy – a Tale of the Wild West and Reanimated Buffalo. The book sold fairly well and it is now available in e-book format. A few years later I approached Richard Chizmar at Cemetery Dance Publishing about the possibility of putting together a four author – four novella collection of weird western fiction.

  “That sounds good to me,” Richard said. “Who do you have in mind?”

  Well – the first fellow I had in mind was Joe Lansdale. I mean who else could I get to write a weird western. The man practically invented the genre. Only at the time that I was putting this collection together Joe had run into a hurricane or two that blew through Texas and his house was in a heap and he was busy putting it back together.

  So my next call was to Brian Keene – whom I knew and respected as a fellow who could meet a deadline and get the job done. I also approached Tim Curran and Tim Lebbon – who had both had some experience in the field of weird westerns. In fact, while I’ve got your ear you REALLY ought to check out Tim Curran’s weird west novel Skin Medicine.

  It took several years before the collection, Four Rode Out, finally saw print. Cemetery Dance printed 1000 copies and they sold out within three days. You can still find a copy or two but they are scarce and I have ALWAYS wanted to see this book in e-book format so that more readers could discover this quiet little yarn.

  I wrote this story thinking about Larry McMurtry’s epic saga Lonesome Dove. No, there isn’t any cattle drive but I was going for the tone of the McMurtry’s wonderful slow and powerful storytelling. I do not know if I truly succeeded in my aim. Perhaps you can tell me better once you’ve sat down and read this yarn.

  Yours in storytelling,

  Steve Vernon

  Chapter 1 – Nothing beats the crowd-clearing pattern of a well-made eight gauge shotgun blast

  Bass Clayton stared up at the big yellow moon and frowned thoughtfully.

  That moon looked way too damn much like an eye to him. He wondered if he could reach up and stick his thumb into that big yellow moon-eye. At the very least he ought to be able to shoot it the hell out of his existence.

  Bass’s Daddy used to say that God looked down on the badness men got up to through a big old spy glass in the moon. Bass figured that God shouldn’t look that hard. What goes on down here in the dirt was really none of God’s business.

  Something flew close by overhead.

  Bass heard the flutter of wings.

  He shivered a little even though it was most likely nothing but a night owl.

  It wasn’t likely to be anything else that he could imagine.

  He was too far up for people. Bass liked it that way – good and lonely and comfortable. The farmers and the settlers and the man in tall hats hadn’t found these hills yet – but it was only a matter of sooner or later before they finally did.

  That sooner or later wasn’t worth nothing but a fist full of runny goddamn shame in the eyes – as far as Bass was concerned. He liked the emptiness that the hills out here offered a man. He liked the peace and the purity of it all. There was nothing but the darkness and the stars looking down and the moon staring blind and quiet.

  Bass especially appreciated the quiet.

  He had heard way too much noise – and worse things – on the battlefields of Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Chickamauga.

  “Do you think you can take him, Bass?” Hawley asked, talkin
g too loud as usual.

  “We’ll know if I can take him, soon enough,” Bass allowed. “Unless you go and yell him the hell awake with all of your needless jawboning. You’re making more noise than a rusty tin buckboard bouncing down a frozen road.”

  There always had to be a tagalong on a job like this.

  As a full-time professional bounty-killer Bass Clayton would have given an awful lot to find himself an employer who would truly trust him on his own look-out – just for one time. Bass never did care much about working with other people – but there wasn’t a boss out there who ever saw things Bass’s way.

  Why did bosses always think that a hired killing needed a well-paid witness? You didn’t really need to hear a tree fall over to know that the worm or the steel or the flame had taken it on down.

  “Sorry,” Hawley whispered, too loudly.

  Bass rode in slowly.

  It never paid to hurry into a killing. You wanted to see death coming from a long ways off, rather than riding in too fast. If you could see something you could kill it – and if you killed it before it saw you the odds were that it wouldn’t get much of a chance to kill you on back.

  That just made perfect sense.

  “Shh,” Bass whispered.

  Killing was just exactly what this going to take.

  Bass had no illusions on that. A man like Silver Grimes wasn’t going to lay down his gun without putting up a fight.

  Why not?

  Bass sure wouldn’t go easily if the positions were reversed.

  He wasn’t even all that crazy about being out here like this – but it was his job.

  Besides, Grimes ought to have known better than to beat Judge Rupert Chizmar at a poker game. Judge Chizmar was an awfully sore loser and he could swear out an arrest warrant and write up a death sentence faster than a one-handed man could drop a greasy shovel.

  Bass kept his eye on his target.

  He could see the light of Grime’s cabin – one lonely lantern light staring out the cabin window into the swallow of a mountain nightfall.

  “Is he in there?” Hawley hissed – way too close to Bass’s ear.

  “No,” Bass said sarcastically. “It’s likely too warm and comfortable in that cabin for him. A rough old boy like Silver Grimes is bound to be out catching himself a little of this fine and bracing night air, enjoying the mosquitoes feeding on his arms and asshole - and the wind-shivers and the melodious farting of the hoot owls.”

  “Do hoot owls fart?”

  “Only if you listen for them with your nose wide open and smelling hard,” Bass said. “You’ve got to hold your mouth just right.”

  Hawley was a local boy, considered tough by some. Hawley would indeed have been fine against a couple of fall-down drunks or maybe even two or three old blind men or possibly even a gang of six year old girls if he caught them at nap time – but treeing an old he-bear like Silver Grimes was a whole other story that was most likely to end up badly – no matter who told it out.

  Bass wondered if Hawley even knew that.

  “I don’t get it,” Hawley said. “Is he in there or not? What’s with all of this creeping hoo-diggery? Why don’t we just ride on in and kill the sorry-arsed goomer?”

  Hawley raised his pistol to shoot it into the air.

  Bass pulled his own pistol first.

  “You shoot that pistol and I will drop you like a black bean turd.”

  Hawley looked surprised at Bass’s threat.

  “I just wanted to fire off a shot to scare him out.”

  “Shooting holes in a perfectly good sky never made much sense to me,” Bass replied. “Sooner or later it’s all bound to come back down at you.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Hawley said.

  “Bass was too tired for subtlety so he settled for simple and blunt.

  “You probably never will,” he said, leaning over and resting the business end of his pistol barrel firmly against the gully between Hawley’s flaring nostrils. Bass saw a booger up there in the snot holes, quivering green and leery-like in the breeze of Hawley’s sudden panicked exhalation. “Now shut the hell up or I will blow a hole in your head and stomp straight on down through the hole that the bullet leaves behind and then take my chance with Silver Grimes all on my lonesome.”

  Hawley shut up, stepped back and fell flat on his ass.

  As far as Bass could figure, falling on his ass was the only sensible thing the mule-headed lamebrain could have done. At least he had the sense to fall quietly. There was hope for the boy – maybe. The instinct for survival that fall demonstrated spoke of some deep and buried vestige of common sense, no matter how atrophied it might actually be.

  Bass knew damn well that he was whistling into a foolish wind but it never hurt to be optimistic.

  He looked back down at the cabin.

  The light was still burning in the window.

  That was either a good sign or it wasn’t.

  Nobody wasted good lantern oil if they were sound asleep – so Bass figured that Silver Grimes was awake. He was most likely awake and sitting up, down there. Maybe he was reading a good book, although Grimes didn’t particularly seem to be the bookish sort. Maybe he was praying or smoking a pipe or wondering just how the hell he had ever got to where he was right now.

  Or most likely he was squatting down there in the shadows with a rifle or maybe a shotgun.

  Yeah.

  That was it.

  Silver Grimes was looked like just the sensible sort of a man who would favor the close-in crowd-clearing pattern of a well-made eight gauge shotgun blast. He was certainly big enough to handle the mule kick too.

  Yup, Bass decided, Grimes was undoubtedly crouched down there in the darkness. Maybe at the doorway or maybe he was hunkered down behind an overturned oak table. He was down there for certain-sure, ready and waiting for what came next.

  The only question was just how long of a stretch should Bass make him wait.

  He had to think on that for a while.

  “What are we waiting for?” Hawley whispered nervously.

  Hell.

  Bass decided right then and there that he was going to have to kill Hawley dead and then raise his bones back up and kill him some more before it could ever get quiet enough around here to think on just how he was going to get Silver Grimes out of that cabin for long enough to kill him dead too.

  “I figure I’m going to give him twenty years or so down there and hope that maybe he’ll die off from old age or intensive boredom,” Bass said.

  Hawley sat there gawking foolishly.

  A man might as well try and teach pigs to fly by swinging them by their ear flaps and dropping them off of great stupid cliffs rather than wasting perfectly good sarcasm on a fool’s deaf ears.

  It is a stone cold fact – if you argue with an imbecile too long or too often and some of that clabber-headed hoor-raw and head rash was bound to rub off on you.

  “Close your mouth,” Bass advised. “You’ll catch barn owls and night flies, leaving it hanging open that way.”

  So Hawley closed it mouth.

  “Good,” Bass said. “Now keep it that way.”

  Bass brought his pistol barrel up sharply, tagging Hawley’s elbow, numbing his gun hand just in case the boy got foolish or lucky. Bass then carried the movement upward, raising the pistol and bringing it down har against Hawley’s skull bone. Hawley let his breath out all at once like he had been surprised – which he had. He slumped to the ground and lay in the dirt. It was a good thing that he had been sitting at the time. Sitting left him that much less of a distance to fall from.

  Bass leaned down to touch the man’s chest. Hawley was out cold but still breathing – sleeping the sleep of the comatose and brainless. Bass hadn’t hit Hawley all that hard but the bigmouth would definitely be dreaming for a while.

  That was a good thing too.

  Everybody needed a few dreams to scare the night darks away.

  “That gets him out of my hair,” Ba
ss whispered to himself.

  He talked to himself a lot these days – especially whenever he found himself on his own lonesome.

  Why not?

  He didn’t figure there was anybody else around who was smart enough or dumb enough to listen.

  He eyed the gun barrel warily.

  A pistol whipping can play hell with your gun sight but right now Bass wasn’t all that worried about accuracy. If anything happened tonight it would most likely happen up close and sudden. There wasn’t likely to be all that much call for aiming in a close-up situation like this.

  Besides, Bass generally made it a point to hit what ever he shot at.

  “If you figure where the bullet is going to hit,” his Daddy used to tell him. “If you can really feel that slug sinking home into that other fellow’s brisket, then the odds are good that you are going to hit just what you figure on. Remember that, where ever you go. Shooting starts a whole lot deeper than the hand or the eye.”

  Feel it, point it and don’t miss.

  It sounded easy enough and it usually was until somebody started pointing guns back at you. Resistance always complicated matters and that was pretty well what Bass was worried about right now. Silver Grimes might just care enough about being shot at and get to resisting Bass right back into missing his own shot and then there was no telling what might possibly happen from there on out.

  Bass hoof-hobbled his pony right next to where Hawley was lying and snoozing.

  “You keep an eye on that dozy-headed clown,” Bass said to the horse, like he could understand. “You can water him if you like or even dung his brain box. Like as not you’re the smarter of the two.”

  It was better this way, on foot and alone. He was close enough to walk on down and a man on a horse in moonlight made too tempting a target by far. He hauled his own shotgun out of the buffalo skin scabbard he’d paid a half-assed half-drunk Mexican hide skinner to cobble together. In that scabbard he was packing a double barrel ten gauge Greener with fourteen inch barrels – just short and ugly enough to guarantee the ruination of a man’s day for sure. It wasn’t nearly as hard-hitting as the eight gauge he imagined Silver Grimes was packing but it would do for doing with when the spark hit the possibility.