For Ambiance

Silver boot heels thump along the porch planks, and a gunslinger pushes through the saloon’s batwing doors. Blind Jon pauses his playing, leaves his fingers poised over piano keys, and allows silence to hang for one heartbeat. The bartender told him to greet hard customers this way. For ambiance.

The boys at the card table laugh and curse. They flick and scoot their chips, pretending to ignore the gunslinger.

This new gunslinger’s tall and lean, straw-haired, and blue-eyed. Everyone knows Blind Jon’s not actually blind. That’s an act the bartender dreamt up. For ambiance.

He knows, Jon does, that the new girl, Betty, will be smitten, falling instantly in love with all handsome men. Despite her profession.

Sure enough, when she sweeps down from the stairs on cue, ignoring Jon, whom to her is nothing but furniture, she smooths her blue dress, dolls her hair, and instead of playing coy, like the older women, or making crude jokes, she floats straight to his shoulder where he sits at the bar, ordering whiskey, the gunslinger does, and, doe-eyed, shyly, she asks his name, where he’s from, and so on.

On Sundays, when the saloon closes—by law—the women play cards, sit around topless or even naked, battling belching and farting contests, and fan themselves while Jon tunes his piano, or tries to. It’s slow work between fetching the women’s glasses of whiskey. They never thank him, of course.

Some men would enjoy the tits part, but Jon wishes he’d never agreed to the blind act on account of the little brother treatment and the bossing around.

On Easter, Jon wears a suit and brings Betty a bouquet of lilies—she’s been here exactly a year, and he’s screwed up his courage one inch a month until he’s grown a foot of foolishness. 

Everyone laughs, shakes their heads.

She kisses him on the cheek, heightening the hilarity. A chorus of wolf whistles and braying, foot stomping, and glasses clinking to snarled toasts of love. 

The madame snatches the bouquet from a red-faced Betty, then bets it on the next hand of poker. Desperate, gasping laughter. One woman actually tips from her chair and wails over an ass full of splinters all evening.

By lantern light, Blind Jon discovers the bouquet of lilies nailed up in the outhouse.

For ambiance.