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.)