said to Amanda Gribb, waving his hand at Plato’s beverages.
“So your hand is wore out—nothin unusual in that, is there?” He put a salacious twist on the question.
“It’s goin a be like that the rest a the season, thanks to the goddamn Forest Circus.”
“What’s that supposed a mean?”
“It means the goddamn Forest Circus screwed up the best deal I ever had.” And he told him the complete story about the Hellhole, about the line of wardens waiting to use it, about the unearthly shrieks of malefactors as they slid down into the brimstone.
“And? What’s Forest got a do with it?” Plato Bucklew worked for the Forest Service, and as much as he complained about his hardheaded, shortsighted bosses he did not like to hear a red-shirt, even Creel, put the organization down.
“Tell you what, I got me a bad nasty one today, cocky little rat works in a bakery in Iron Mule, killed a doe. Then he drops his pants and gets down on the ground and proceeds to have sexual relations with the dead doe. And I’m standin about twenty feet away.”
“Jesus!” Plato inhaled his whiskey the wrong way. “That’s”— he drew on his course in criminal psychology—“that’s like deviant bestial necrophilia! What’d you write him up for?”
“Nothin, except he was in a buck-only area. Game laws don’t say a word about deviant hunter necrofoliage or whatever.”
“Well, look at the bright side. It could a been a lot more writin. At least it wasn’t a buck—then it would a been homosexual deviant bestial necrophilia. So what did you do?”
“So I tell him to get his pants up and I take him to that certain pulloff and things sure look different. Looks like the Forest Service had a convention a road scrapers and backhoes in there. It’s all opened up, room for fifty cars, fancy trailhead signs, posts, two a the new shitters, garbage can, trail maps, the works. But I can’t figure out where the sweet spot was. I walked all over that place, smackin the ground with a fence post Forest left layin on the bank, and nothin. Nothin! I got the guy standin there watchin me. He must a thought I was nuts. In the end I had a write him a regular ticket. I told the other wardens, and at lunch we was all there, jumpin around, pokin at the gravel, tryin a find that sweet, sweet spot. Total nada. It’s gone.”
“Kind a hard a believe it was ever there. You didn’t say nothin about it last year. Sounds like hyperactive imagination. Or mass hypnosis.”
“I wish you’d never took that damn criminal psychology course. It was a secret. Couldn’t tell anybody.”
“Suppose so? There was a memo come in late last fall to Jumbo Nottage about a lot a traffic out there at that pulloff. Parkin problem. I guess he thought maybe it was a good place for multiple use enlargement. He probly thought the traffic was tourists and day-trippers. Didn’t occur to him that Game & Fish was roastin citizens in there like ears a corn.” He signaled Amanda Gribb.
“Amanda? Ain’t there a mix drink called the Devil’s Somethinor-Other?”
“I’ll look in the book.” Amanda had been trying to hear the low-voiced conversation but missed everything except “bestial necrophilia,” which Plato had pronounced in a rather loud voice.
“Yep, there’s somethin called a Devil’s Tail. It’s made with vodka, rum, and apricot brandy.”
“That’s it. Give us two a those. Doubles. In honor a my friend, Warden Creel, who pulled the devil’s tail all last year and wants a do it again.”
ONE SUMMER DAY AROUND THE TURN OF THE LAST century, two men in overalls, one holding a roofing hammer, stood in a Casper street and looked at a new building.
“I guess that’ll show the cow crowd who’s got the big sugar in this town,” said one.
The other man smiled as though testing his lips and said, “One or two, maybe. You should a went into lawyerin, Verge, it’d be your buildin we are puttin up.”
“Rather have a ranch. That’s where the real money lays.” “There he is right now,” said the man with the hammer, nodding at the tall frock-coated figure striding toward them with his scissory gait. He did not look at them but at the building.
“Well, well, boys,” said lawyer Gay G. Brawls. “That’s the queen of Casper, and we’re the ones put her up.”
In the decades after statehood every Wyoming town had to have at least one imposing building. These banks, courthouses, opera halls, hotels, railroad stations, and commercial buildings were constructed of local-quarry stone, of concrete blocks shaped to resemble stone, and some were iron-fronts ordered from catalogs. Few have held on to their original purpose and so today a cell phone company operates incongruously in a handsome opera house, and the ornate Sweetwater Brewery is occupied by a fence company.
The iron-front Brawls Commercial gave the impression of a kind of extravagant prosperity, surrounded as it was by flimsy false-front wood structures. The various parts of the building—handsome cornice, pilasters that separated windows and doors, a lintel stamped with Egyptian motifs separating the ground floor from the upper story—had all been shipped by railroad from St. Louis. A neoclassical entry with garlanded cornices and inset colored glass distinguished the front. On that summer day in 1900 lawyer Gay G. Brawls carried his own papers to his new office upstairs. The ground floor housed a dry-goods shop behind the town’s first plate-glass window and featured bolts of calico, fustian, and trimmings. In the back was an up-to-date selection of men’s suits, which the proprietor, Mr. Isaac Frasket, altered to fit the broad-shouldered, small-waisted cowboys who plunged for the outfits. He paid an extra rent to store hatboxes and millinery supplies in one of the rooms on the second floor, side by side with boxes of old depositions, wills, and case notes.
Brawls’ practice was busy and select. The best-known of his clients was William F. Cody—Buffalo Bill. Lawyer Brawls, in concert with other legal beagles, helped the showman teeter along the edges of his various bankruptcies occasioned by business dealings with the infamous Denver newspaper and circus entrepreneurs, Bonfils and Tammen.
Lawyer Brawls, thirty-three years old when his building went up, had long horseman’s legs, black hair as fine as cat fur, and a beard shadow like a mask. He was almost a handsome man, his appearance spoiled only by a reddish mole on his left eyelid, but the brilliant aquamarine color of his irises pulled attention away from that flaw. He seemed made for the saddle but suffered an allergy to horses at a time when horses were transportation. Even ten minutes in an open carriage set his eyes streaming and a clenching headache ricocheting behind his eyes, so he walked everywhere, and if a destination was too far to travel by shank’s mare he didn’t go. He owned one of the first motorcars in Casper.
In 1919 Mr. Frasket, the old dry-goods merchant, died and his corpse was shipped back east. An ice cream parlor rented the premises and became a popular gathering place. Seven months later Gay G. Brawls himself, on his way back up to his office after a lemon phosphate, dropped some business folders on the stairs, stumbled and slipped on them, cracked his head, and after a week in a coma, died at age fifty-three.
His son, Archibald Brawls, also a lawyer, and as tall and dark as his father and with the same blue eyes and born-to-the-saddle
