Two Gunslingers

  I sauntered into the center of town and my boots clicked underneath me. A few steps took me forward and I planted my feet firmly into the ground. My poncho was draped over me, extending to my knees.

About fifty feet away from me, letting his trenchcoat hang in the wind, was John Cormick. He whipped his Colt .45 out of its holster, spun it around on his pointer finger a dozen times, then promptly dropped it, and Cormick glanced at me briefly, cleared his throat, then picked his gun back up.

“This town isn’t big enough for the two of us, sherriff!” he cried out to me.

I had heard that phrase twice before: once when I had my gun fight with Lenny Lint last year and once when the county commissioner and I were deciding how big the town should be five years ago. But now it was Cormick and me, face-to-face, with only a considerable separation of fifty feet.

“Well I certainly reckon it ain’t,” I yelled back to him. “What do you intend to do about it?”

Cormick placed a hand on his holstered pistol and a gust of wind whistled past him. It blew the tails of his trenchcoat into the air, wiggling them around behind him like incredibly flamboyant snakes. The sun, slowly setting in the (not quite as wild as right here) West, cast an orange ambience over our showdown.

My hands twitched over my holster as I watched Cormick in the distance, who seemed prepared to shoot at any moment. A symphony of trumpets, guitars, and banjos that somehow fit perfectly with the face-to-face, intense showdown theme of our duel echoed through the air, so either there was a band in the crowd or God wanted to spice things up.

Cormick flashed a smile at me and I squinted my eyes back at him, trying my best to look mildly intimidating. We stared intently at each other, seeing who could furrow his eyebrows deeper. We stood there, staring. Staring. A lot of staring. I mean, wow. So much staring. 

Someone in the crowd yelled out, “Wow, it’s been five minutes of them doing nothing but I’m so intrigued!”

out of its holster and fired off a single bullet directly at my chest. I collapsed to the ground, like I had been sucker punched after saying something nasty about his mother. I heard him laugh in the distance and fire off another shot into the air.

Then I stood up. We made eye contact and I saw his jaw drop. He stared blankly at me, bewildered by my apparent defiance of nature. I flung my poncho over my shoulder, revealing a metal sheet with a single indent from the bullet. 

“My god!” someone in the crowd cried out. “That is an incredibly ingenious twist that  would work well in the first film in a trilogy of films!” 

Someone else replied, “What’s a film?”

I threw the metal sheet to the ground and whipped my gun out of its holster, tore the hammer back, and pulled the trigger.

…And then my gun clicked. No bullet came out. I opened the cylinder and there were no bullets. Somehow, before the gun fight, I had forgotten to load my gun. With my heart pounding in my ears, I looked up at Cormick to see that his expression of shock and fear had turned upwards into one of satisfaction. He pointed his gun at me and pulled the trigger.

…And then his gun clicked. He pulled the trigger again, but it clicked once more. Cormick started shaking, his face turning dark red. 

“Why won’t this darned thing work?” he howled. He threw the gun at the ground and a bullet suddenly fired, ricocheted off my metal sheet, and hit him directly in the head. He flopped to the ground, dead.

A moment of silence engulfed all of us. 

“Well that was pretty stupid,” said someone in the crowd.

 I put my gun back in its holster as the crowd dispersed, muttering words of disappointment. Alone, I walked over to Cormick’s corpse. His face was trapped in a frown, with the only new mark being a bullet hole in his forehead. I bent over and absentmindedly reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, perhaps looking for a few bucks or a cigar. Instead, I got a letter with “for the sheriff” written on it.

Standing there, in the middle of an empty town, I began to read it.

“Howdy sheriff. I have something real important that I need to tell you. Check my other jacket pocket.”

I laid the letter down then reached into his other jacket pocket and found a note. The envelope was unmarked and inside was a piece of paper that said nothing more than two words.

“Screw you.”