CHAPTER 18

Every three or four years, Rude Crawlback was amazed to realize that there was a bank of photos covering the wall between his bar and the front window.  The last time had been a stormy Thursday when thunder had rattled the bottles behind the bar and the power flickered on and off.  He had walked around the empty bar to look out of the front window, checking on how close the lightning strikes were getting, when his vision was caught by a flash reflecting off a pane of glass.  

He was staring at his favorite picture, thinking of the many secrets it held when the door opened with a rush of wind and his loyalist customer, Charm Lupinski, bustled in folding an umbrella.  “What the hell are you doing out in this weather?” Rude accosted her.  “I’m thirsty, I need a drink. What the hell are you doing?" Charm replied, shaking out her rain bonnet.  “That’s sure some dingy collection ya’ got there.”

Rude looked again, this time taking noted of the cheap frames that were coming apart and interspaced with dust-encased cobwebs.  “Still,” he said, turning back to mix her regular order, “There’s almost a hundred years of history here.”    

“Yeah,” Charm droned, “Same old, same old.”  “Oh, come on,” Rude chided, “That’s why you married me.  I’m a business owner.”  “That’s why I divorced you.  You wouldn't even leave the damn bar to live in a house like a human being.”  “Okay,” Rude threw up his hands, “We’ve gotten over it.”  Charm looked at her drink and  shrugged.

“So of all these pictures,” Charm said taking a deep breath and looking up, “Which one would you save in a fire?”

“Aw, I guess my all-time favorite is that faded tintype of Uncle Jeb and Horace Hoolahan in front of the old Crawlback Bath and Bar sign.  And all those other cowboys standing around with them on the wooden porch of that first building.  I wasn’t ever in that one.”  “Well, no,” Charm snorted, “I wouldn’t think you could be.”

The story went that the figure at the center of the shot was the dashing Jubilation Crawlback in 1906; a young caballero with a six-shooter at his hip, and each arm around a woman of undetermined repute.   Near the edge of the frame was, supposedly, Horace Hoolahan with his eyes slit and a hand on his gun.  And one of the women in Jube’s embrace was the former Mrs. Anna Mae Potts Hoolahan, currently the showgirl, Trudence Lafarge, who had dodged a posse in New Orleans by hiding amidst a bevy of mail-order brides heading for Montana.  

Rude wasn’t sure that Clem would even recognize his mother, since it was rumored that he was barely two years old when she left.  He didn’t really like Clem enough to feel sorry for him, but he was an old man, so Rude figured live and let live.