Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness throughout the world.

Contest Special  – Ron Gold

January 15, 2007

EPHITAPHS

By Ron Gold

6’6” Tommy Paterson got comfortable in his wheelchair.  He opened a bottle of cold beer and watched a Harvard crew practicing sculling on the Charles River, some 14 stories below his Cambridge high rise.

“Their precision reminds me of the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes with oars,” he told himself.  “I sure hope they win next week.”

Then the kitchen telephone tinkles and he gets it on the fourth ring.

“Professor Paterson,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Tommy.  This is PeeWee.  Terrible news.  Joe was shot in the back by    Bully Waterbury about an hour ago.  I took him to Gallagher’s.  The

boys won’t start cremation ‘til you get here.  I’ve booked you on the 6:30 to Tucson out of Logan Airport.  I’ll meet you at the airport.

As he drove from Tucson to Tombstone, PeeWee reported how Bully, drunk as usual, walked into Joe’s office and nonchalantly shot him in the back.  He muttered something inconsequential, then stumbled back to the saloon.

Tommy was no stranger to Tombstone’s only funeral parlor.  He’d been there too many times in the past, especially when his mother died along with his stillborn twin sister Clare.  

Now his father reposes there.

Jimmy Gallagher, who graduated high school with Tommy, greeted

him and PeeWee (Joe’s associate publisher.)  “Tommy, PeeWee. I’m so sorry,” he said, embracing the tall professor and the much shorter newspaper executive, who nodded in agreement.

“I know you probably haven’t given this much thought, but I assume

you want your dad buried on Boot Hill.  He wrote so much about it.”

“Dad hated Boot Hill.  He called it a free tourist trap.  Nobody goes to visit family or loved ones.  Visitors with cameras treat it like a circus side show.  ’Step up, folks, see the fat lady, the bearded lady, the sword swallower and Jo-Jo, the dog faced boy.’

“And read those godless tombstones:  ‘here lies Lester Moore.  4 slugs from a .44.  No Les.  No More.’  And ‘here lies a Chinaman’.  And, don’t you love this one? ‘Hanged By Mistake.”  Joe was too good a man for that cheap carnival.  My father won a Pulitzer Prize.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy admitted.  “I read The Magician/Bounty Hunter, a

great book.  But are you sure you want Joe cremated?”  We just got  some new first class coffins.  Beautiful woods and quality metals.”

“No,” Tommy answered.  “Cremation!    Jewish bodies turn to goo.  Your morticians pickle Christians, like lab rats, in embalming fluid.

My father deserves more than goo, more than a rat.”

“OK, Tom, we can do it tonight and hold a memorial service here

by 1:30-2 o’clock tomorrow afternoon.  OK?”

“Fine.  See you tomorrow.”

PeeWee helped Tommy unpack.  They hung his black eastern suit, white shirt and black tie on hangers.  They carefully placed Tommy’s gun, holster and extra six-gun alongside the Gideon’s Bible in the bedside lamp table.

“PeeWee, where does Bully get his beer money?”

“Tommy, I think he’s a hired gun.  Three or four times a year he takes off for a month.  And the news wires report murders throughout the southwest.  Then Bully comes back in a store bought suit and a wad of

cash that could choke a horse.”

Tommy then called his father’s best friend to share the sad news and plan tomorrow’s funeral.

Word of Joe’s assassination spread throughout Tombstone and the

chapel was filled with mourners.

Tommy rose and began his eulogy, telling how a talented but asthmatic young man went west, got a job on the Tombstone Epitaph, got healthy, sent for his wife and settled in – for life.

He told of his father’s lifelong friend, a wiry Mexican magician who moonlighted as a bounty hunter, distracting criminals with slight-of- hand. mis-directional card tricks, capturing them at gunpoint for the reward money

A commotion erupts in the street.  Bully Waterbury staggers out of the saloon and invades Gallagher’s chapel.

“Well, lookee here.  If  it ain’t El Nino de Cambridge, the college perfesser from Massey-choo-zitz.  A coward and a no-good polecat.  And I’m gonna shoot him like I killed his pa.”

Tommy pivoted his wheelchair to meet Bully face-to-face.

He stood up to his full height in the wheelchair and asked PeeWee to strap his holster and six-shooter on his hip.

PeeWee’s arthritic fingers failed and Tommy pushed him onto the chapel floor.  “Can’t you do anything right?” he asked his old friend. The crowd was shocked.  Tommy faced Bully – eye-to-eye.

Tommy then fell to his knees, grabbing his spare pistol from the wheelchair’s seat and got off one shot that ripped through Bully’s forehead before his pistol could clear its holster.

As Tommy stood over Bully’s lifeless body, Vincente Molina, Joe’s compadre, the Magician/Bounty Hunter, lifted the new neatly hand-lettered tombstone from the wheelchair’s cushion and handed it to Jimmy Gallagher:

Here lies Bully Waterbury: I should have been smarter.  And just a tad faster.

“And like you, Senor, he should have read Joe’s book”.

“Let’s go, PeeWee,” Tommy said, “You’ve got a newspaper to publish and I’ve got a crew race to watch and some family ashes to bring home. 

“Viya con dios, Vincente.”

Ron Gold

outthinkresumes@aol.com