Blackjack Chapter Two

 The Ballad of Blackjack

By

Travis Naughton

Chapter Two

Before he could do anything to avenge the causes of his unrelenting heartache, the haggard gambler folks called Blackjack had to do something about his excruciating headache. Taking a blow to the temple from his namesake blackjack (a small but heavy hand-held weapon made of lead or sand wrapped in a leather sheath) would kill most people, but our Blackjack, a widower who had lost his will to live years ago, would not be put out of his misery that easily. He'd learned the hard way that he was not an easy man to kill. 

Blackjack, born Alan Keller, had been living with unimaginable pain ever since his family was brutally murdered in their home in Kansas City on July 4, 1876. When his wife Olivia and eight-year-old daughter Sarah died at the hands of a drifter who had followed the family home from the river town’s Independence Day reveries, the man known as Alan Keller ceased to exist. A broken man consumed by grief and a thirst for alcohol and revenge took his place.

The pain from the recent wound to his head paled in comparison to the pain he felt when he woke up in old Doc Porter’s office on July 8, 1876. He had been shot twice in the chest at point-blank range by the same six-shooter that had been used to put a pair of bullets through the hearts of his beloved Olivia and Sarah on that fateful night. When he finally regained consciousness after two surgeries and four nights of fever-induced nightmares, Doc Porter told him he was lucky to be alive. 

“A collapsed lung and a shattered rib nearly caused you to bleed out, young man, but luckily we were able to patch you up and save your life,” Doc told his patient.

He did not feel lucky when Doc broke the news about his wife and daughter. Far from it. The only things he felt from that moment on were an all-consuming desire for revenge and an overwhelming eagerness to join his family in the next life.

As soon as he was able to stand, the recovering patient bid farewell to his doctor and staggered into the first saloon he saw. He spent the next few days trying as hard as anyone ever had to drink himself to death. After a good scolding from the good doctor, he decided to put off his own demise for a while and instead focus all of his energy on tracking down the Devil who had taken everything he had ever loved from him.

Charles Morgan, editor of the Kansas City Courier, was shattered by the deaths of his daughter and granddaughter. In his agony, he offered his revolver to his son-in-law and begged him to hunt down the man who killed them. 

“I would light out right now and do it myself if I were a few years younger, Alan,” Charles pleaded to his daughter’s widower. “Please, son. Take it. Avenge my girls.”

“Charles, you know I swore to never pick up a gun again after the war. I want that scum dead as much as you do, but I won’t shoot anyone ever again.”

“Then take this,” Charles said as he reached into the bottom drawer of his desk. “It’s called a blackjack.”

Turning the heavy object over in his hand, the younger man asked, “How do you use it?”

“You strike with it. A blackjack is great for kneecapping someone during a fight or smashing a man’s trigger finger into a thousand little pieces. One good shot to the base of the skull can kill a man.”

“A blackjack, eh? I like it.”

“Then go and use it well, Alan. Your job at the paper will be waiting for you when you get back.”

“Charles, I’m not planning on coming back. Alan Keller died with his wife and child that night.” He paused for a moment as an idea took root in his mind. “Call me Blackjack from now on.”

  “Alright then. Godspeed to you, Blackjack.”

Three years later, almost to the day, Blackjack wound up on the wrong end of his own weapon, the result of letting his guard down while in a drunken haze. “I won’t make that mistake again,” he told himself. The Heartbreak Bandit who had relieved him of his watch, cash, and coin pouch the previous night had also taken the only photograph he owned of his wife and daughter, and Blackjack knew that he would have to get sober and stay sober long enough to track down the conniving thief and to finish the job he set out to do in his father-in-law’s office. 

But first he needed some headache powder, a hot breakfast, and some transportation. And to acquire those things, he would need money. Despite the red-headed woman’s best efforts, Blackjack was not quite destitute. He’d accumulated a sizeable stack of winnings as a semi-professional gambler, and one day while he was trying to figure out the best way to safeguard his stash, he had the clever idea to swap out the lead in his blackjack for an equal measure of 24 carat gold. 

The thought of cracking the skull of the woman who unknowingly tossed aside a pound of solid gold while absconding with about twenty dollars in cash and the photo of his family brought a sadistic smile to Blackjack’s parched lips. 

(Read Chapter Three of “The Ballad of Blackjack” next week.)

The Ballad of Blackjack

 Hello again, faithful readers. It's been a while since my last blog post, and I hope you will forgive me for my apparent inactivity. The truth is that I have been quite busy writing for the Boone County Journal, but in a departure from my previous habit of posting my work to my blog on the same day as it appears in the newspaper, I thought it would be of benefit to the Journal's new owners to promote subscriptions rather than give away my material for free. 

After further reflection, I decided it would be okay to post these pieces after a period of time has gone by. Hopefully readers will subscribe to the paper to support a locally-owned business and its contributors while also having the option of reading my previously published work. In addition to my usual opinion column "Out of My Mind," I am also writing a serialized Western called "The Ballad of Blackjack." Here, for your enjoyment, is the first installment of the saga.

The Ballad of Blackjack

By

Travis Naughton

Chapter One

As the first rays of the morning sun filtered through the small room’s lone window, a crumpled heap lying on the dusty wooden floor began to stir. The heap, a man in his mid-40s with graying hair and a week’s worth of stubble on his face, was accustomed to waking up in strange places. In fact, it happened with such frequency that the citizens of Alexandria began referring to the old drunkard as Blackout rather than his preferred moniker Blackjack.

Of course, Blackjack was itself a nickname, one used by people who were never privy to the Christian name he was given by his mother and father nearly half a century earlier. His parents were by now long gone, as were many others who might have recalled the name he was assigned at birth: Alan Keller. No one had called him that in years. Not since the day he met the Devil himself. 

It took Blackjack a bit longer than usual to shake loose the cobwebs on this sunny Sunday morning. "How much of that rotgut did I drink last night?" he wondered to himself as he struggled to his feet. The pounding in his head was more intense than any hangover he’d had in his life.

Out of habit, he looked around the dingy room for a bottle, hoping for a little hair of the dog to help take the edge off. Curiously, he found no traces of liquor anywhere in the tiny shack. There was only a small cot, a wooden table with two rickety chairs, and what appeared to be a pool of dried blood on the floor. Blackjack instinctively traced his fingers over his face, searching for a bleeding wound. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d had his nose broken or lip split in a drunken bar fight. Finding his nose and mouth uninjured, he again contemplated his throbbing headache. A moment later, Blackjack discovered the source of his pain just above his left temple.

The lump was quite large, and it was still oozing a small amount of blood where the scalp had been split open. As more light filtered into the room, he could just make out the shape of a small familiar object on the floor beneath the cot. All at once, the events of the previous evening came into sharp focus. Despite the pain, Blackjack chuckled when it became clear that the cause of this headache (and a few others over the years) was a beautiful and fierce woman.

After his discharge from the Union army, Corporal Keller took a reporter job at the Kansas City Courier where he wrote about the western frontier, post-war reconstruction, and other current issues. It was in the Courier’s offices where he would meet his future bride, Miss Olivia Morgan, the managing editor’s daughter and personal secretary, a force of nature that Alan was unable to resist. She was the only woman he had ever loved, and she and the child she would later bear would become the center of Alan’s universe.

The woman he had met Saturday night at the Alexandria Saloon was decidedly not the love of his life, but as they laughed and played cards and drank whiskey throughout the evening, the man now known as Blackjack allowed himself to open the door to his heart just a crack. That was all the opening the red-headed beauty (referred to as “the Heartbreak Bandit” on wanted posters throughout the West) needed. After they closed down the saloon, the woman who called herself Jane invited Blackjack to come back to her room for a nightcap. 

As soon as the door closed behind them, Jane embraced Blackjack and kissed him with more aggression than passion. She ran her hands all over his body as if she were searching for something. The last thing he remembered was Jane finding the heavy leather sap, or blackjack, that he always carried. Although he had earned his nickname while playing cards in seedy towns up and down the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, only Blackjack himself knew that the striking weapon bearing the same name as his favorite card game was the true origin of his nom de guerre. The irony that the splitting headache he woke up to that morning was caused by his own namesake weapon was not lost on him. After retrieving it from under the cot and discovering that his coin pouch, wallet, and pocket watch were missing, Blackjack realized that his simple, yet brutally effective weapon was the last possession he had to his name.

Unbeknownst to her, the Heartbreak Bandit had made a potentially fatal mistake when she chose her latest victim. Inside the stolen wallet, hidden behind the modest amount of cash Blackjack had won playing cards at the saloon, there was a faded photograph of a woman and a young girl with the words “Olivia and Sarah, 1871” written on the back. 

Blackjack knew all too well that he could do nothing to bring back his murdered wife and daughter. But as he stepped out into the bright sunshine already beating down on the Kansas plains at that early hour, he pulled on his wide-brimmed hat, adjusting it to accommodate the goose egg on his head, and tucked the blackjack into his coat pocket while silently vowing to use the weapon on the killer that took his family, the thief who took the last reminder he had of them, and anyone else who stood in his way. 

(Be sure to read Chapter Two of “The Ballad of Blackjack” next week.)