Jake took the picture. “Sorry I upset you. You want a drink yourself?”
“Yeah, I think so.” She called out to the bartender and asked for a whiskey. “I’m awful sorry, mister, your wife coming all the way here from Kansas just to find him.”
Jake sighed, shoving the picture back into his pocket. Poor Randy. Here he’d walked out on her this morning when she was trying to share something wonderful with him, wonderful to her at least. She probably thought he didn’t want the kid, maybe even figured he wasn’t coming back and she was stranded here alone. Now this. He’d have to go back and tell her Wes was dead. Wes was all the family she had left. It didn’t seem right, when folks had decent family, that they should have to lose them. And now he was all she had left, him and the baby. She would need him now more than ever.
Mellie sniffed and swallowed the whiskey, wiping at her eyes again. Jake noticed the kid with the blond hair had moved closer. He approached Mellie. “This guy giving you trouble, honey?” he asked, a possessive ring to the words.
“No, Clarence, nothing like that. We’re just talking about somebody who used to mean a lot to me.”
Jake ordered one more whiskey, and the kid named Clarence came around Mellie and stood before him in a challenging stance. Jake tried to remember why the name Clarence rang a bell. Wasn’t that the name of the kid who had tried to rape Randy? This couldn’t be the same one. That kid had been traveling with a preacher. He couldn’t be the tobacco-chewing, gunslinging man-child who stood before him now.
“Part of my job here, mister, is to keep an eye out to make sure nobody comes in here and hurts or upsets the girls,” the boy told Jake. “You made Mellie here cry, so maybe you’d just better leave.”
“Clarence, I told you it’s got nothing to do with him. Leave him alone.” Mellie moved in front of the young man, but Clarence shoved her out of the way.
Jake drank down another shot of whiskey and took his cheroot from an ashtray on the bar. He stuck it in his mouth and puffed on it a moment, studying the snot-nosed kid before him. Why in hell was he doing this? “I think you’ve had a little too much whiskey, boy. It’s making you do something real stupid. Now I’m warning you, I’m in a damn bad mood right now, and you don’t even want to see what I can do when I’m in a good mood, so if you have any brains in that skull at all, you’ll back off right now while you’re still healthy.”
Clarence rested his hands on his hips in a haughty stance. He was standing up to this big man with the big guns, and he liked the feel of it, especially with Mellie and his boss and others watching. He felt confident. After all, he knew most of the men in here, figured they’d back him up. This man surely realized it wouldn’t be wise to try anything when he was surrounded by men who would jump in against him.
“I saw you the other night when you came into town with Mrs. Hayes,” he told Jake. “I’ve been wondering about that, who you really are, how the pretty widow woman ended up taking up with the likes of you. Are you really her husband, or just another traveler helping out the poor widow in distress?”
Jake straightened, slowly setting down his shot glass and studying the young man. Good God, was this Clarence Gaylord? The little sonofabitch! “Her name is Mrs. Turner now, and I’m Jake Turner. Maybe you can tell Mellie here and anybody else who’s listening just how you know my wife, Clarence. It is Clarence Gaylord, isn’t it?” Several men sitting closest had already stopped their drinking and cardplaying to watch the confrontation.
“First you tell me how in hell she ended up with you,” Clarence challenged.
Mellie herself backed away then, confused by what was happening. She didn’t like Clarence. Ever since that first night she had taken his money for sex, he had begun hanging around, being a nuisance. He seemed to think he ought to be her favorite, that he should be able to come and see her for free whenever he had the yen, just because he worked here now. He was a cocky, stupid kid eager to be a man and prove he could hold his whiskey with the rest of them. “You’d better be careful, Clarence. This man doesn’t look like any ordinary Joe,” she warned.
“Shut up, Mellie! I know he’s pretty good with a gun once it’s drawn. I just don’t know how fast he is at drawing it.”
Jake almost laughed. “Go dry yourself behind the ears, boy. You try drawing on me, and I’ll blow you clear into the wall behind you! Fact is, I ought to do it anyway after what you did to my wife!”
“Yeah? Well, before you do that, maybe you’ll tell me how it is Mrs. Hayes got to be your wife, if that’s really true.”