Thursday Nights at the Occidental Saloon

ON THURSDAY NIGHTS, SOME of the boys from around the Powder River Basin get together at the Occidental Saloon to play bluegrass. They wedge in next to the back bar, a banjo, a guitar or two, and someone hammering away at the yellowed keys of the venerable upright piano, with the occasional fiddle or mandolin thrown in.

When the boys first started the sessions, it was for their own amusement and that of the Occidental’s regulars, ranchers, town merchants and their wives. Word spread, though, and tourists began to show up, and then the sculptors and poets who’d begun to populate Buffalo as the start of what they called an artists’ community.

The boys usually began with some gospel numbers, “Amazing Grace” and such, in deference to the old folks who arrived early and occupied the closest tables so they could hear. Later, when the old-timers drifted away to their beds, the band would pick up the pace. Some folks even danced in the tiny space between the tables, the band, and the bar, the waitresses dodging the fast-stepping couples as the music reverberated off the pressed-tin ceiling.

Will Burrell had been a regular at the Occidental for the Thursday nights of the past year. Will ranched nineteen hundred acres of cattle land in the Bighorn foothills. His high-school sweetheart wife, Ellie, died five years ago and there were those who thought Will might not survive her passing. He’d hunkered down on the ranch, with just the cattle for company, for four years. Then one Thursday night he’d shown up at the Occidental, in his town boots, white shirt and straw Stetson Rincon, his best jeans anchored for safety by a large-buckled belt and red suspenders. Some of the old folks remembered that he and Ellie had been quite the dancers in their youth. Will proved that he hadn’t lost his touch, gliding through the Two-Step and the Cotton-Eyed Joe.

Once he began coming, Will never missed a Thursday night. He danced with anyone who would join him. At first, that meant Ellie’s contemporaries, sturdy ranch wives who whispered among themselves that they were just glad he’d decided not to lay down and die. Soon others saw that he danced with a grace that belied his fifty-five years and his partners became more varied—the younger wives in town, tourist ladies—all anxious to swing through the old steps with the courtly man of barrel chest, narrow hips and an easy nimbleness on the Occidental’s old boards. The waitresses took to pouring table salt on the corner of the floor that Will and his partners occupied, to aid his sliding steps.

One Thursday night in August, Maya Parr came to the Occidental Saloon for the first time. Maya Parr wasn’t her real name—it was the name she had chosen for herself when she decided she was going to New York City to become an artist, the next Frida Kahlo. She didn’t know then that Frida Kahlo would never have gone to New York City to become an artist, but that hadn’t stopped Maya. And she achieved notoriety over the next thirty years, plying the wealthy who considered themselves patrons at gallery openings, being seen in the right places with the right people, as much a bohemian celebrity as an artist.

Maya Parr had rented a cabin outside of Buffalo. She intended to spend three months painting landscapes of the tawny folds of the foothills colliding with the slate-blue bulk of the Bighorns and return to the city with a show featuring the efforts from her Western season. The gallery on 69th Street where she sold her works had already set aside the dates. Maya had been toiling at her canvasses daily since she’d arrived, so much so that her friend Charlotte, a sculptor, had suggested a break.

“Come to town, Maya,” she said. “Buffalo, Wyoming could use a glimpse of New York, New York, you know.”

“But what is there to do?” Maya asked.

Charlotte arched an eyebrow. “I have one word for you, Maya. Cowboys.”

“You are so bad, Charlotte.”

For her night at the Occidental Saloon, Maya wore a gray tunic over black leggings and red ballet slippers. A crimson scarf she had hand-painted, and which would sell for four figures in Manhattan, was draped with casual precision across her shoulders. Her hair, a handsome shade of silver-gray the product of a two-hour session with one of the City’s best stylists, fell loosely against her slender neck. She decided she looked as New York as she possibly could, so far removed from the east.

The Occidental’s bartender surprised them with two glasses of a passable Sauvignon Blanc when they asked for the house white after settling in at the bar. The band was already fizzing and the postage stamp dance floor crowded as Maya and Charlotte sipped and watched. Will Burrell was in the midst of the crowd, gyrating with Maybelline Black, the wife of Will’s foreman. Maya watched him, pleased with his style and presence amid the less-skilled but equally enthusiastic dancers.

The band finished with a flourish of banjo and mandolin. The dancers cleared the floor. Maya had turned to hear a whispered comment from Charlotte when a voice over her shoulder said, “Ma’am?”

Now, “ma’am” was a word Maya would have been loathe to hear directed to her in New York City, where its rare use was reserved for the elderly or sarcasm. But the word floating to her ears over the din of rattling beer bottles and the insect hum of voices in the Occidental Saloon was soothing, respectful and enticing, all at the same time. She turned to its source.

“Ma’am, might I have the pleasure?” Will tipped the brim of his Stetson.

The gesture was so old-fashioned, so proper, that for a moment Maya thought it was a joke and hesitated. Will, concerned that his request had not registered, simplified it. “Would you like to dance, ma’am?”

The band, deviating from the traditional as they sometimes did, struck up “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” Charlotte nudged Maya like a twelve year old wingman at a junior high dance. Maya took off her scarf and handed it to Charlotte.

Taking Maya’s hand, he said “I’m Will.”

“Maya,” she said. Her lips hinted at a smile but withheld it just a bit, an expression she had perfected for the purpose of inducing doorman, gallery owners, and reporters to do her bidding... and which had never failed to close a sale of one of her paintings.

Will inclined his head and smiled back at her, just with his eyes, a thing he did when something—a golden sunrise or the wobbling steps of a newborn calf— gave him pleasure.

The boys played the music up-tempo. Will and Maya danced apart. The floor was packed, but the other dancers made a space around them, almost as if they knew something special was happening. Maya abandoned herself to the music, moving to the beat with her eyes cast down and then bringing them up, almost looking to Will but not quite, a mannerism he found enticing. Will first seemed to Maya to be shuffling, almost lazy in his steps, until she realized the elegance of his moves, the big man bordering on balletic, concentrating amid the sound and light enveloping them.

The band came to the end of the song and launched immediately into “Wildwood Flower.” Maya found herself in Will’s arms, enveloped, secure in a way she had never felt secure before. She wasn’t sure what was happening. Neither was Will, other than he understood that his arms had been empty for too long. Time passed, and one dance melted into another until Charlotte tapped Maya on the shoulder and excused herself at midnight. Maya stayed.

The next Thursday night at the Occidental Saloon, Will and Maya, though arriving separately, had no dance partners other than each other. The Thursday night after that, they arrived together.

Last Thursday night, they arrived together, too, Will in his Stetson, town boots and a tuxedo, Maya in her wedding dress. She kicked off the heels she had worn for their wedding and put on her red ballet slippers, just as the boys began to play.

John Keyse-Walker

John Keyse-Walker, a native of Ohio, had a thirty-year career as a trial lawyer. After dull decades of writing briefs and contracts, he began writing fiction in retirement and enjoys the creative freedom to “simply make stuff up.”

His first novel, Sun, Sand, Murder, won the Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award and was followed by the second novel in the Teddy Creque Mystery series, Beach, Breeze, Bloodshed. His published shorter works have appeared in an anthology, Down to the River, and Writer’s Digest magazine. He is a member of the Mystery Writers of America.

He is an avid fresh- and salt-water angler, tennis player, and kayaker. He and his wife divide their time between homes on the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio and Charlotte Harbor in Florida and love nothing more than taking a meandering road trip through the West. Find more about him at johnkeyse-walker.com and on FaceBook at www. facebook.com/teddycrequemysteries.

“Thursday Nights at the Occidental Saloon” is his first short story to be featured in Saddlebag Dispatches.