the ballad of scott witherspoon

this is a character study, and dedicated to my old sparring partner, scott “the other spoon” (RIP, you hick).

there’s a town called larmie, and it’s found on the edge of the black swamp and between the two hills of heaven and hell. it’s been home to gunslingers, pen-pushers, snakeoil peddlers and stolen postmen.

it’s also home to scott witherspoon.

scott lacks what you’d call the social graces, but what he missed out on personality he more than made up for in alcohol tolerance, a cache of firearms, and a unique understanding of the unemployment system sufficient enough to keep him from having to earn a living.

his neighbours had a special kind of word for scott, which they only used when they were quietly whispering about the way he watered his garden at precisely 7.30am every morning while the kids were heading off to school. watering his garden wasn’t in itself a crime, but doing so wearing only a budgie-smuggler is close to being a crime in laramie, and the only reason laramie hadn’t strung him up by his stubborn old neck was they didn’t think such a thing would kill him and they were afraid he’d come back as a zombie. after all, that’s what he promised he’d do.

yes, scott’s neighbours had a name for that old boy, and it certainly wasn’t tinkerbell, though someone once painted it on his front door after a night in which the local peacekeepers found him passed out in his garage wearing a pink tutu and a clown mask.

“i ain’t a fairy,” he told the hellraiser who thought it was funny to paint on scott’s door. “but i sure am fair.”

and with that he blew that little fucker’s head clean off with what he liked to think of as his glok, but which was really some kind of homemade single-shot blunderbuss-handgun which fired a handful of shrapnel he’d scooped out of a tin he kept just for that purpose.

how he thought this was fair was anybody’s guess. scott didn’t really like to explain himself much.

he kept to himself mostly, unless he was drunk. when he was drunk, he’d tramp down the middle of the street, flapping his arms and wailing in the night as he sought out one of the town’s fifty-three brothels (he didn’t much care which one) and spent the evening worshipping the flesh, so to speak. whores didn’t stay in the brothels of laramie for long. usually just for as long as it took for scott to saunter in and claim them in a room for a night. they’d come out the next morning all wild-eyed and weak at the knees. what they saw no one ever knew, because they didn’t talk about it.

it was like he’d sewn their lips shut and they couldn’t bring themselves to tear the stitching and scream.

sometimes he disappeared for weeks on end, and rumours had it he’d cross the border to mehikko and revel with the younger whores of a brothel known simply as el grande salon and when he returned he’d do so quietly in the middle of the night like an exhausted bat, his long coat slapping his knees as he strode down the middle of the street.

mehikko was a place scott didn’t really like to talk about. one time he was sitting at the bar of old con’s place and old con asked him – straight up – what mehikko was like. scott looks up at the old bartender over his grimy glass of hooch and says in a voice which made the whole bar freeze and be still for a few seconds, “you even mention that place again to me, old con, and i’ll nail your balls to this here bar.”

everyone believed him.

there were sixteen nails in the bar already and eight young tourists who’d never screw again were huddled in their houses cursing the day they thought that fat fucking hick was just using some quaint local expression.

there were other reasons no one really fucked with scott witherspoon.

those reasons were the stomper brothers.

the stomper brothers were ten of the meanest and most chilling serial murderers ever to haunt the passage between heaven and hell. they holed up in a small cavern north of the town and weren’t adverse to dropping in uninvited to trash a bar, shoot some locals and make off with a town wench or two.

none of this mattered to scott, and many simply commented bitterly that it was more a wonder scott wasn’t more friendly with the stompers.

it all came to a head in the spring of ‘32 when scott was on one of his binges and was laid out in tilly’s – a whorehouse of ill-repute. well, when i say ill-repute, i mean it was known for being home to some of the more creative of sexual positions and possessed several devices banned in most sensible worlds. scott called them icing on the cake.

the cake this particular night was newcomer dixie, whose red locks and skinny legs grabbed his attention the second he walked through the door. he began popping back vodka and viarga proo in equal doses as he prepped himself for what he figured would be a night of fucking, fucking and maybe a little more fucking.

the stomper brothers entered tilly’s via the servant’s entrance at the rear, something scott may have appreciated given the amount of vodka he’d been putting into his guts. they assembled in the middle of the bar and demanded dixie bring them a drink.

scott lay his big hand on that girl’s wrist and said in a voice which carried only to her ears, “hey! where you think you’re going?”

and she looked at scott, and then she looked at ten of the meanest bastards this side of the devil’s laundromat and she shook with fear. “i’m sorry, mister, but i’m getting them a drink. they don’t look very nice at all.”

scott swivelled on his stool, and the creaking sound of the steel bolts straining to keep that stool upright made two of the stompers flinch and the rest just raised their eyes and licked their lips in anticipation of a short, but probably enjoyable fight.

scott’s watery eyes took in the posse of gunslingers and then he gave out a pfft and turned back to dixie. “fuck ‘em,” he said, slapping his shotglass back down on the bar. “they’re pussies.”

the gunslingers, as one, went for their guns.

typically, what happens when ten gunslingers go for their guns is the unfortunate dude they’re aiming to kill gets a whole lot of holes in his body and fountains out blood like he’s a garden ornament. unfortunately for the stompers, they were fixing to fire at scott witherspoon, and he didn’t take much shit from nobody.

he was over that bar like a snake, faster than his fat old body should have moved, and when their bullets finished shattering the bar, he poked his head up over the top and he said, “it my turn, yet?”

and he took a slug from a bottle of vodka, reached into his pants and pulled out a homemade blade. with his other hand, he smashed the bottle of vodka. “good for ganking, good for glassing,” he said.

when the peacekeepers came the next day, they had to use buckets to take those stompers from tilly’s and since that story made itself around the town, no one ever fucked with scott witherspoon.

still, the neighbours kept their secret name for him close to their chests and whispered it only when they’d had a good look around to make sure he wasn’t anywhere close, or passed out on the lawn in front of their house, or peeking through their windows if they happened to be young, pretty and mostly female.

to everyone in the town of laramie scott was simply called the cunt.

Tags: character study, fiction, scott witherspoon