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The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion

A Novel

Tom Doherty Associates

Most of what follows took place in the West.

Not just any West.

It was the West of legend and suckling-memory, where drifters caked head to heel with dust swilled red-eye whiskey at long mahogany bars, punching holes in the tin ceilings with their big Colts to impress their half-naked, quartz-eyed hostesses; where buffalo rolled thunder across gaunt desert, grass ocean, and the great mountain ranges where the earth showed its tusks, stopping only to splash in the wallows and scratch their burlap hides against the cowcatchers of the Central and Western Pacific and the mighty Atchison; where red-lacquer Concords barreled down the western face of the Divide, pulled by teams of six with eyes rolling white, whips cracking like Winchesters above their heads; where glistening black locomotives charged across trestles of latticework oak, burning scrubwood in greasy black streamers and blasting their arrogant whistles; where highwaymen in slouch hats and long dusters pulled bandannas up over their faces and stepped suddenly from behind boulders, firing at the sky and bellowing at shotgun messengers to throw up their hands and throw down the box; where all the towns were named Lockjaw and Busted Straight, Diablo and Purgatory and Spunk.

A West where gamblers wore linen and pomade and dealt aces from both sides of the deck and derringers from inside their sleeves; where cowboys ate beans and drank coffee around campfires to harmonica music, and everything was heavily seasoned with tin. At sunup, drowsy and stiff, the cowboys drove undulating herds of grumbling, lowing, high-strung longhorns past ridges where feathered warriors balanced their horses square on the edge, bows and lances raised against the sky while the brass section blared and kettle drums pounded. Gun battles cleared busy streets in a twinkling and bullets rang off piles of rock in the alkali flats with a ptweeeeee!, kicking dust into the eyes of lawman and outlaw alike. The U.S. Cavalry was invincible, and bandits and gunfighters were celebrities, trailing battalions of paparazzi in brown derbies: Custer had yet to stand on his hill, Jesse to turn his back on Bob, and Wild Bill to draw his fabled hand. All the wagon trains came with concertinas, and all the undertakers and hangmen looked like John Carradine.

It was a West where prospectors, cotton-bearded and toothless, led mules over foothills riddled with shafts, Russian grand dukes shot buffalo from Pullman cars, bandidos wore their ammo belts crossed and flashed gold teeth in duplicitous grins and called everybody Gringo; where women baked bread in gingham and looked cute in buckskins and spilled like ripe peaches out of corsets and sequins and wore feathers in their hair. Train robbers shinnied up telegraph poles, tapped into the lines, and rapped out misleading messages to citizens' vigilance committees on the barrels of their six-shooters. Posses sprang up like cottonwoods, lynch mobs stormed jails, fiddlers played "Little Brown Jug" at church raisings, and legions of tintack piano players knew all the notes to "Buffalo Gals" by heart.

A West, this, where cattle barons gathered in clubs and railroad magnates sat in parlor cars to smoke cigars and plot mayhem; where assassins in their employ took target practice on grangers and Chinamen and shot at the heels of tenderfeet to make them dance. Where tall saguaro cactus grew everywhere, even places where it had never existed; where saloon mirrors were in inexhaustible supply and every bluebelly sergeant was named O'Hara and wore his hat brim turned up in front. Men rolled cigarettes and spat into cuspidors. Most of the lumber went into saloons and gallows and markers on Boot Hill.

Sam Grant was in Washington, soldiering his way through his troubled second term, chain-smoking General Thompsons, drinking Hermitage by the case, and wishing he'd never heard the name Bill Belknap. Lily Langtry was on tour. So were Lotta Crabtree and Jenny Lind, and Edwin Booth was performing as Prospero in Denver. Judges Bean and Parker adjudicated in Texas and the Indian Nations. Ned Buntline guzzled Old Gideon, philandered with married women, and wrote reams of frontier claptrap that sold millions in New York and San Francisco. Wyatt Earp was in Dodge City getting a tooth pulled by Doc Holliday. Chiefs Crazy Horse and Gall rested on the Powder River, watching old Sitting Bull smoking up dreams with a blend of open skepticism and hidden contempt. These things are matters of history and bear no direct application to our tale, but they help set the stage for the rip-roaring action to come.

It was a West of ruthless ranchers, patient housewives, crooked sheriffs, courageous pioneers, eager hellcats, leather-lung bullwhackers, scheming carpetbaggers, spinster schoolteachers, blacksmiths, gunsmiths, wheelwrights, farriers, dressmakers, swampers, grave diggers, and prostitutes with hearts of gold; also of ice and iron. One out of three men answered to Frank or Jack or Billy, regardless of whether his real name was Henry or Leander, the women all seemed to be either Sadie or Jane, and any cowpuncher worth his found knew which one to kiss and which to marry. Everyone seemed to walk around wearing a sandwich board advertising his or her true nature: card cheat, music-hall lecher, bushwhacker, army deserter, wife beater, husband poisoner, snake-oil merchant, newspaper rat, whiskey trader, reader of French novels. All wore the uniform of his station: the top hat tilted at a disreputable angle, the garish waistcoat, the rhinestone buckle on the pointed shoe, the leaded walking stick, the boots with flaps over the toes. But it was also the West of elaborate obfuscation. Dry-goods stores sold muffs with pistol pockets in the linings, spring-operated wrist holsters, and knife scabbards to be worn on lanyards around the neck. Unescorted women walked the streets in safety, but the theaters and ballrooms dripped with murder. It was possible to purchase arsenic in quantity and pistols small enough to conceal in the palm of one's hand. The West's reputation for politeness and hospitality was based on the threat of imminent death for transgressors.

It was the West also of rampant optimism. The consumptive in search of a cure, the criminal in quest of redemption, the failure in pursuit of a fresh start, the bigamist in flight from his wives; each found a fresh page upon which to start his journal anew. A world bereft of records, fingerprints, and the ubiquitous camera, and a blank amorphous map labeled the Great American Desert, offered panacea to a variety of ills. Not since Alexander fled the shadow of his father into the vast reaches of the Known World had our solitary planet so plainly beckoned to the wanderer to cast aside his burdens and press on.

It was the West of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Billy the Kid; but it was also the West of William S. Hart, Roy Rogers, and John Wayne. It was big enough to encompass the bombastery of Buffalo Bill and Cecil B. DeMille and the skullduggery of the bloody brothers Harte.

This was Johnny Vermillion's West; a West that should have been, but never quite was.

Tannery, Nebraska, was a good place to sin, and now it's gone.

A few overgrown foundations, a well fallen in and filled with topsoil and chaff are left, and they're invisible from the traffic whirling past on the state highway. But for a few years, before the buffalo vanished and the farmers took their trade west to Omaha, Tannery roared like a young bull.

It boasted fifteen saloons, buck-toothed whores, a Masonic Temple, two banks, and a theater called the Golden Calf. This last seated six hundred, with triple-decked boxes nearly all the way around, but it stood vacant during the warm months when the hides were ripe. Stacks of them two stories high surrounded the tannery itself, attracting flies and repelling visitors not directly involved with the industry. The larger theatrical troupes passed the place by from May to November, leaving the citizens to manufacture entertainments of their own. A sporting lady known only as Roberta once rode a tame buffalo named Ambrose into the taproom of the Metropolitan Saloon and halfway up to her quarters on the second floor when the stairs collapsed under the weight; but show me a ghost town without a buffalo-riding whore named Roberta in its past and I'll show you a town that plain bored itself out of existence. Our story is more original than that.

Nothing in the short stormy history of Tannery ever compared to the night the Prairie Rose Repertory Company performed The Count of Monte Cristo at the Golden Calf. People who claimed they were present that night were still talking about it years later, after the town had been dismantled and reassembled on the south bank of the Platte under the name Plowright.

Sadly, Plowright proved no more durable in its second incarnation than it had in its first. The spring runoff following the disastrous winter of 1886–87 swept the entire town downriver, drowning one-fifth of its population and scattering the survivors from Ohio to Oregon. But journals and letters carry the story, and aged participants close to the principals were candid in their memoirs.

During the frosty autumn of 1873, in response to a telegraphic exchange between Tannery and Kansas City, Isadore Weaver, proprietor of the Golden Calf, posted the first new bill to garnish the front of the theater since Mabel North, the Yankee Belle, had trilled "Listen to the Mockingbird" to the accompaniment of a live canary on its stage the Saturday after Easter. This was sensation. By the time he brushed out the last blister, a crowd had assembled, exhaling clouds of steam as they read the legend aloud:

FIRST WINTER TOUR J. T. VERMILLION'S PRAIRIE ROSE REPERTORY COMPANY PRESENTS "THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO" (ADAPTED BY MR. C. RAGLAND FROM THE CLASSIC NOVEL BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS PÉRE) FEATURING MR. J. T. VERMILLION MISS APRIL CLAY MAJOR EVELYN DAVIES MME. ELIZABETH MORT-DAVIES MR. CORNELIUS RAGLAND ONE PERFORMANCE ONLY

A separate notice was plastered across the bottom, informing interested readers that the play would take place Saturday, November 7, at 8:00 P.M., and that all would be admitted for the sum of fifty cents.

"Never heard of any of 'em," huffed Lysander Hubbard, publisher of the Tannery Blanket ("We Cover the Plains"); the poster had come by rail and not from his shop. "What've they done, I wonder?"

Stella Pardon, who ran the general merchandise with her husband, blew her red-lantern nose into a sturdy handkerchief. "Honestly, as long as none of them shot Lincoln, what does it signify? I'll be there, with or without Loyal."

That, demonstrably, was the general sentiment. Weaver pasted up a SOLD OUT notice three days later.

On the Friday before the performance, the westbound U.P. panted to a halt beside the Prince Albert Memorial Depot and stood with steam rolling off its boiler while porters unloaded trunk after trunk onto the platform. Each piece of luggage was stenciled with the theatrical company's name in large, easy-to-read letters. Taking shelter inside this Stonehenge from flying snow, the five new arrivals introduced themselves to the consumptive young staff reporter for the Blanket and a large sampling of residents and transients that had been gathered there for more than an hour.

The chief spokesman, identified as Mr. John Tyler Vermillion of Chicago, was a tall fellow a year or two shy of thirty, slim as a trotter. When he removed his hat, a fine soft black one with a broad brim, his longish fair hair whipped about him like a young Byron's. He wore silken moustaches and an imperial in the hollow of his chin, and even the yoke-shouldered buffalo hiders present acknowledged him uncommonly presentable. Existing photographic portraits indicate chiseled bone and eyes of that crystalline shade of blue that always reproduces pale in black-and-white. He must have made a fine figure that day in his gray ulster and beaver collar, Wellingtons shining on his narrow feet. Even Stella Pardon's eyes glistened like steamed plums.

"May I present Miss April Clay," said he, sweeping every gaze with his hat toward the woman who had just joined them from aboard the day coach. "She will be playing the unattainable Mercedes; and may I warn you, gentlemen, she remains in character offstage as well as on."

A chuckle coursed through the group, warmest in the throats of the "gentlemen" thus admonished. Bowler, badger-piece, and filthy slouch hat came away as one, in some cases exposing crania covered since All Hallow's Eve. For Miss Clay was a dainty daub, in the language of the day; a strawberry blonde with skin like milk, dressed to the fashion in a tweed traveling suit and cape, with an adorable little hat pinned to her upswept hair. She was then in her twenty-second year, five feet four in tiny patent leathers with a hint of heel. Her eyes were hazel, slanted gently (her grandmother, it was said, was Russian), and as large as asteroids.

"Where did you appear last?" inquired the young man from the Blanket.

The wind gusted. Miss Clay swayed and placed a slender hand in a suede glove against the reporter's waistcoat for support. She asked his pardon, withdrawing the hand. "The Tivoli, in Kansas City. I assayed the role of Viola in Mr. William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. I was Maria as well, and briefly a sailor."

Her voice was astonishingly low for one of her stature. The reviewer for the St. Louis Enquirer had compared it to "a bassoon in heaven's ensemble."

"Three parts in one play? How did you remember all the lines?"

"The sailor was nonspeaking," said Mr. Vermillion. "We are a small company, but versatile. Each of us seldom portrays the same character twice in succession, and we often perform double and triple duty. In the hierarchy of the stage, repertory is solidly working class. In that, we are very like your own fine panners and prospectors, sifting the streams and prowling the hills all round for gold."

Someone in the audience pointed out that Tannery was a buffalo town, not a mining camp. The leader of the troupe was unabashed.

"Your noble stalkers and skinners, if you will, conquering the brute and refining its outer shell for personal comfort. We come before you, ladies and gentlemen, to distract and amuse, to provide a brief holiday from the trials of daily existence."

Applause crackled. He bowed and swung his hat. "Madame Elizabeth Mort-Davies, who has charmingly agreed to strain credulity and appear as the hero's silver-haired mother."

Mme. Mort-Davies' hair was, in fact, a rather alarming shade of violet, piled high and caught cruelly with combs; it was not observed to move even when the wind toppled a large valise from the mountain of luggage. She was nearly as tall as Mr. Vermillion, straight-backed and buxom, and fifty-five if she was a day. Matrons were her specialty, but she had been known to don a beard for Polonius, and strain credulity to cracking to allow Miss Clay to abandon the ingenue for a smaller part that offered more challenge. Saturday night, she would also pull a set of false whiskers as the venal warden of the Chateau d'If.

Her husband, introduced as Major Evelyn Davies (emphasis on that first long E), formerly of the Queen's horse guard, stood a head shorter and round as a barrel hoop in a buffalo coat and morning dress, dove-gray gaiters on his square-toed boots. He wore white handlebars and carried a gold-headed stick. His responsibilities included the beleagured Edmond Dantes' aged father and also the Abbe Faria, Dantes' fellow prisoner.

"Finally, Mr. Cornelius Ragland, the plain sturdy band that holds together our quartet of gems. Tomorrow night you shall know him as the villainous Danglars, and perhaps recognize him among an army of coachmen, stewards, and prison guards. However, impersonation is not the sum total of his genius. He is the playwright who distilled Dumas Peré's great work into three manageable acts, with time for intermission."

Young Mr. Ragland was plain as tin, but far from sturdy; he made the hollow-chested journalist look burly by comparison. Stoop-shouldered, bespectacled, with ears that stuck out conveniently to prevent his hat from settling onto his shoulders, he appeared miserable in the cold, and his suit of clothes was far from clean. At every glance he belonged to that genus of sickly male described as Too Fragile for this World.

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Excerpted from The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion by Loren D. Estleman. Copyright © 2006 Loren D. Estleman. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
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