Gunslingers Don't Sing or Dance by Mike Marino (any book recommendations txt) 📕

Isadora, Jean-Paul and myself awoke early, (too nervous to sleep soundly the night before anyway)  to meet the flamboyant pirate-smuggler-ancient mariner Captain Marcel to begin our seaward  journey to Mexico’s Vera Cruz aboard his sloop ‘The Creole’. She was a sleek, fast ship called a ‘New York’ sloop measuring in at 40’ long with a wide stern and a simple jib and mainsail with a large boom.

I couldn’t help but notice Isadora looking  ravishing and as radiant as an exploding planet out of the latest Jules Verne books I had just read. Space travel? Trips to the moon? To the center of Earth?  Around to World in a Balloon? Ludicrous! We are not gods of mythology or folly!!

The morning sun was bathing her in a golden hue. Her jet black hair was smooth and had a lustre I had overlooked before. It was the sky of night holding the secrets of the stars and heaven. Her bronze bayou skin took on the sheen of those delicious caramels that I used to buy by the bagful in a candy store  in Boston. Tiny beads of sweat were forming on her supple neck as a result of the already rising humidity of the steamy New Orleans morning. She wore a short print skirt along with a sheer blouse of lightly woven cotton that was clinging to her skin thanks to the humid conditions giving way to a veiled view of small firm brown breasts slightly  visible behind the cotton curtain that made me hunger for more caramel candy.

Jean-Paul, could have been an attraction at a traveling medicine show preceding a sermon of a fire and brimstone preacher under the big top of a tent revival leading the faithful to slaughter as sure as any Old Testament sacrifice.

He course was always  looming nearby protecting Isadora, so better I avert my gaze lest he use the blessed by blood machete he always carried with him to send me to an untimely demise. We were all in a hearty mood as we boarded the ‘Creole’ and set our packs neatly on deck. We were going after treasure which alone would have us in a great mood. Add to that the deep blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico waiting to engulf us in her beauty as we would be carried across her warm waters to Old Mexico and the promise of Spanish stolen Aztec-Toltec gold.  All things considered, you have the perfect conditions for adventure.

“She may get a little choppy out there, but I can assure you, ‘The Creole’ is one strong lady and has taken on high seas before. She be as strong as the one legged whore with one green eye I knew when sailing me bigger ship to the Gold Coast of Africa during the slave trade,” Captain Marcel roared laughing. “God spare me. The things she could do with only one leg would kill a man if she had two!”

I had to admit. The Captain was a pirate at heart and used to keep two colored  female slaves he bought at auction in the African market aboard his slave trade schooner as entertainment. He eventually sold them in Mobile, Alabama to a bawdy house catering to sailors. “There’s more where they came from,” he told his first mate. Seems Captain Marcel wanted a fresh supply just to keep himself interested. “I bought them from the negro traders who sold their own kind. Imagine, coloreds selling other coloreds! It was cheaper than buying from the whites.”

We were now ready to set a course and leave the cacophony of the harbor behind us. A crazy pirate/smuggler at the helm, transporting a  voodoo vixen of a queen of New Orleans, her trusted bodyguard who  had so many tattoos I felt we could hang him in the finest art gallery in all of Europe as a work of art, and me, a dime novel writer of pulp. A ragged trio  heading into Mexico with it’s roving bands of bandits in the countryside while revolution was at the throats of Emperor Maximilian, the faux leader of Mexico placed in power by the victorious French.  Foremost in my mind however was the fact that Monty Debauchery and his Canadian gang of outlaws would be on our trail.

Hopefully those stories regarding angry Aztec spirits were just that, stories.

The Soiled Doves and Painted Ladies of Camptown

An ‘Outlaw Kitty Stetson and the Bordello Gang’ Dime Novel Excerpt

By Baxter Dooley

Kitty Stetson and her female gang of ex-saloon and bordello girls were the scourge of Texas in the late 1860’s. While the James Gang and the Daltons specialized in robbing trains and banks, Kitty and company held every saloonkeeper and bordello madam in every Texas border town at gunpoint while they cleared the den of sin of greenbacks and silver dollars. They also used this opportunity to recruit fresh female gang members from the camptown ladies who worked the red light districts and had had enough of can-can do dah do dah with every dusty cowpoke fresh off the Chisholm trail who came galloping into town with a money belt bulging with legal tender to gamble, drink and to camp it up in Camptown with the soiled doves and painted ladies.

Kitty was one herself fulfilling a contract she had made with the devil. In this case the devil was her husband Flint Barstow, a con artist and saloon owner in Brownsville, Texas. He promised her the world, but that world ended up in beatings and his constant  cheating on her with the other girls. One night after the saloon had closed she walked behind the bar and grabbed Flint’s pistol he always kept handy. All six chambers were loaded.

She walked up the stairs to the room where Flint was in bed with the new redhead girl  from Illinois he had just contracted for. The door opened slowly and the light from the oil lamp was burning low but she could make out Flints body under the covers while the redhead from Chicago was cleaning herself at the wash basin.

The next thing Kitty knew...the gun went off...all six shots filling Flints prone body as it jerked with each penetrating slug. The redhead screamed and turned in alarm, her movement forcing the wash basin to the floor with a crash.

“There, that’s the end of that,” is all Kitty said as the smoke cleared. She helped the redhead calm down and consoled her. It was a fateful moment in both of their lives. They were free from their contracts and downstairs in the money box there was loot enough to get away before the sheriff came to investigate and make an arrest.

They hurried back upstairs and took off their feminine finery and traded them in for pants, snap shirts and boots and bandanas from Flint’s closet. On their way outside to steal two horses to make their getaway, they grabbed two more guns and boxes of ammo when Kitty remembered Flints prized possession...his black stetson with silver inlays. “I’ll take this too as a reminder of that dirty dog!”

That is how Kitty got her name. It was also the beginning of a spree of saloon robberies along the Tex-Mex border. When the Texas Rangers came riding hard, the Bordello Gang would simply dash across the border into the safety of Mexico.

---- Baxter Dooley----

Personal Journal Entry

Baxter Dooley - August 3, 1867

The Tex-Mex Mex-Tex Border was always a wild and wooly region.  In fact the entire Mexican country was in turmoil this year. Rebels were fighting to oust the French usurpers who stole the throne on behalf of Napoleon the Third along with tensions mounting at the border over jurisdiction. Always a murky line in the Rio Grande sand.

We were slowly sailing across the Gulf of Mexico aboard the ‘Creole’ with our plan to make landfall just north of Vera Cruz. We would draw too much attention pulling into port with the ever watchful eye of the Mexican army just waiting for  a ship load of gringos. Our main worry was Fort San Juan de Ulúa which overlooked the entire harbor, built originally as a fortress against 17th Century pirates intent on plunder.

We were now de facto pirates ourselves in search for the lost treasure of a lost civilization. We decided to anchor offshore, out of town and out of sight.  From the ‘Creole’ Captain Marcel would row us to shore and let us off where we would disappear into the Mexican landscape and the town of Vera Cruz.

As jumped into the surf with our canvas packs. Marcel yelled out, “Bonne Chance” Good luck. We’d need it. If the Mexicans knew we were after treasure, we’d be standing against the wall of Fort San Juan blindfolded and shot full of holes so we could pass for Swiss Cheese after being held in a damp, dark dungeon with rats and lice.

It was this reality facing me as the three of us reached the dirt road leading away from the beach to take us into the violent vortex of Vera Cruz. I’d give anything for the safety and peace of mind found at night in a Chinese opium den with a kimono clad celestial angel.

Personal Journal Entry - August 3, 1867

Baxter Dooley

Upon entering Vera Cruz on foot we found it to be a metropolitan tapestry of cultures and history that range from pre-Columbian Toltec and it’s gilded golden age of ritual and human sacrifice to the pomposity of  today’s ruling French imperialist regime well under attack by Mexican nationals. Napoleon the III it seems will meet his Waterloo here in Mexico. He won’t last much longer.

We must have been a sight to the casual observer. Three odd looking gringos on foot emerging from out of nowhere looking dusty and tired. We needed food, liquid and a bath. Although I must admit the musk Isadora was emitting was fueling my senses. This was going to be a long trip!

We checked into a small hotel with cantina. There were only two rooms left so Isadora and Jean-Paul checked into one and I alone in the other. If I played my marked deck of