Profanity by Cat

Word Count 1,685

Written for the Lancer Writer ‘55^th Anniversary Episode Tag Celebration’

Episode Tag for The Buscaderos WHN

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The day was a mite chilly, but Teresa’s head was aching with the heat flying between her brothers.  She’d intervened twice already.  The second time went about as well as the first, which had gone really badly.

“Johnny – stop needling your brother!  It was hard for him to testify against Violet like that!”

“Oh – it was hard all right.  Hard enough to be real distractin’, right, Scott?  Those new pants a good fit, are they?” 

Teresa bit her lip.  She knew perfectly well what Johnny was implying, though she thought he thought she didn’t.  She wanted to laugh, would have done, if Scott hadn’t looked so annoyed.  And tired.  And downright miserable, in all honesty. 

“Oh – f…, I mean go away, Johnny!”

As if she didn’t know what he’d been going to say.  She’d lived on a ranch all her life – she knew the words the hands used when they thought she wasn’t around.  She’d giggled over them with her schoolgirl friends often enough.

“Pretty, wasn’t she.  Bet you kissed her.”

“I did not!”

Teresa knew he had.  She’d been allowed in the jail to look after Violet’s needs, as the only woman who cared to help her.  And Violet had told her all about what had happened.  But it was no use saying anything.  There was something Scott had to get out of his system and maybe, just maybe Johnny was pushing him into revealing what that thing was.  Or maybe he was just going too far in his funnin’, like he did sometimes.

“You think Violet and – what was that guy’s name – him, they stopped off soon’s they got far enough away, for some ..?”  Johnny glanced at Teresa and she tried to tell him with a shake of her head to stop teasing Scott.  It seemed to her that Violet wasn’t the problem at all.  Scott hadn’t even mentioned her once since it’d all happened.  They’d cleaned up the house together and not once did Scott say anything about Violet.  About the gang, yes, he’d told her about them, and as she’d helped the house girl to scrub the floor to get rid of that blood, he’d stopped and told her what Johnny had done.

But no mention of Violet.  It was like his brief history with her didn’t count for anything in Scott’s mind, not compared to whatever it was that was bothering him, anyway. 

Then Scott pushed his horse into a canter and rode out ahead of them, with no word of explanation. 

Johnny pulled Barranca up next to Teresa’s horse and they ambled along together for a while, neither saying anything.  Teresa’s headache receded a little as she consciously relaxed her shoulders. 

“You think I push too hard at the closed door that is Scott these days?”  Johnny asked, his expression rueful.  “Since we arm-wrestled, and I thought I was forgiven for being the right Johnny Madrid, he’s been more and more difficult to talk to.  Not even a good night in town has loosened his tongue about that damn Gatling gun and what they did with it.  If he hadn’t testified this morning we wouldn’t even know what happened.”

“I tried too, Johnny.  But he won’t talk about it – he won’t even go and look at the courtyard.  He told the hands not to touch the damage until he got to it himself.  He even persuaded Murdoch that the repairs were his responsibility and he’d fix it in – what did he say? – “in a timely manner”.  That doesn’t seem to mean any time soon.  And it’s the dance next weekend.   I want to start decorating for that in a couple of days.”

“Can’t you drape something – no, I guess not.  All right – I think it’s time to tell him to his face that he needs to stop – to start …”

“Johnny.  I know all the words.  You don’t have to keep trying to find a way around them.”

Johnny took a moment, then laughed out loud.  Then he went through the catalogue of words he was trying to avoid, testing Teresa out with each one, and she grinned, and nodded, and told him the meaning of each one until he’d gone through being shocked, to being amused, to laughing out loud and beginning on the Spanish words.  She knew some of them and was instructed the meaning of more by the time they reached the hacienda.

“I’ll take the horses to the stable hands,” Teresa offered.  “You go and put a bomb under Scott.  You know how to do that, don’t you?”

“I sure do,” Johnny said, apparently mindful that Murdoch was standing by the large hole in the wall.  No more profanity lessons for her, then. 

                                                            xxxxx

Johnny nodded his thanks to Teresa, told Murdoch quickly what had happened at the trial then went to join his brother, who was staring at the bullet holes in the wall as if he could repair it by sheer force of will alone. 

“Why don’t you…” Johnny began, knowing it was the right thing to say to plant that bomb under Scott.

“And why don’t you take your unwanted advice and just get the hell out of here and leave me to deal with this mess.” 

Johnny backed off, hands up as if warding off his brother’s words. 

But his brother hadn’t finished.  “If you want to push me into telling you what’s going on, why don’t you just ask?”  Scott had turned his back on the wall and faced his brother, hands clenched, his whole body tight, ready for something. 

He looked away, across the courtyard and suddenly his knees were locking, his right hand clutching his left wrist, tight, pulled in really tight like he was trying to make himself small but stand tall too.

Johnny knew exactly what was happening, saw the moment Scott heard again the harsh rattle of the gun, the bullets kicking dust out of the wall as they pounded the adobe.  He saw Scott lose himself back in the moment, back, physically there, a moment he’d had himself once, and he ran to his brother and caught hold of him, waiting until the moment passed and Scott was back with him.

“It’s all right, Scott, you’re here, it’s all right.  Come back to us.  Come on, brother, I’m right here, your annoying little brother is right here. “

Scott looked at Johnny, his eyes betraying the enormity of the physical terror he had just faced over again, his body replaying for him the attack on his being as a man, and a soldier, and as Johnny Madrid.  Then his eyes cleared and he was back in the real world again. 

“Shit!”  he said.  Then said it again.  “I survived, and I told Drago, I told him, I could do with a drink.  A fucking drink.   I survived all that, and that was all I could say?”

Johnny pushed his brother unceremoniously across to the bench and made him sit down.

“I don’t know anyone else who could have done what you did.  Face down a Gatling gun when you didn’t know just how crazy Drago was but you did know the man I killed.  And he was in charge of the gun, wasn’t he.  Wasn’t he, Scott.”

“Chapel.  His name was Chapel.  How did you know all this?”

“You told us – at the trial, remember?  You told it all like you was reading it off one of them army reports, like, three men killed and two wounded and we routed the enemy, that sort of thing.”  Johnny knew his mouth was running away with him but seeing his brother like that had scared him, had left him desperate to know what to do. 

“Oh yes, I remember.  But it didn’t seem real – none of it, not until just then.”

“Ever had something like that happen before?”

“Yes,” Scott said slowly.  “A couple of times, after the war.  Things that happen, run through my mind sometimes, but never as – never like that, you know, as if my whole body went through it again.  Standing there, feeling the bullets thump into the wall, knowing any minute Chapel could move the wrong way.”

“Wait there,” Johnny said, clear about what he needed to do next.  He ran into the house, through the great room, grabbed the nearly-opened bottle of the best whisky and two glasses, registered his father’s startled expression, said, “Wait!” and, “Scott’ll be fine!” and ran back to the courtyard, poured generous measures for both of them and then encouraged Scott to say whatever he wanted to say. 

And when Scott ran out of words, Johnny plied him with more whisky then quickly gave instructions to Martín, the new hand. 

“I tell you what we’re gonna do,” he told Scott, with all the authority he could muster.  “We’re gonna fill every one of those holes, together, and I’m gonna tell you all about how it was when I faced a firing squad.”

An old man came into the courtyard.  Fernando, the stonemason who took care of all the buildings, came with his young grandson and the equipment they needed for the job. 

Learning the proper way to fill the holes in the adobe, and standing on the hastily-erected platform side by side while they exchanged their stories and Murdoch watched, then taking a break for the lemonade Teresa brought, passed the whole of that afternoon and on into the early evening. 

Both brothers were a little drunk, their language wasn’t pretty but it was direct, and they got the job done.  So when they walked back into the house, arms round each other’s shoulders, there was none of the forced camaraderie, none of the anger still not quenched that there had been after the arm-wrestling Johnny had tried so hard to end. 

They were true brothers-in-arms, even if they’d been hundreds of miles apart when each had faced their own firing squad, head down for Johnny, head up for Scott, both ready to find out how they would behave in the face of death.  It was a shared, unbreakable bond. 

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