207 Blind-Sided in Brown's Hole, Wyoming

The Kid.

His reputation preceded him. Nefarious train robberies, bank heists, and gunslinger shootouts put him on posters throughout the West in the summer of 1822.

That's why he drank alone at the Blindspot Saloon in Brown's Hole, Wyoming, a dustbowl town perched atop nothing but hot dirt. The place was emptied of its cowards, yellow-bellies, backstabbers, and reprobates an hour after the Kid's sighting at the pass. Only the bartender, "Ol' Jim," remained.

The Kid was parched when he busted through the swinging doors of the barroom.

"What'll it be?" the bartender barked.

"Whiskey!" the Kid barked back. "Your finest." The bartender slid over a full glass.

"Our finest--and our only," he said. The Kid looked at him and thought something about him strange; he gulped it down and winced. "Gets better by the fifth one," the bartender added.

"Where's everybody?" the Kid asked.

"You're the Kid," Ol' Jim replied. "Killers and liquor don't mix for folks lookin' to stay livin'.

"What about you?"

"Me? Been dyin' for years."

Ol' Jim was right. The sixth one was toothsome. By the ninth, the Kid, blind drunk, stumbled upstairs to a brothel room to sleep it off.

Twenty-two hours later, the Kid stumbled back down. Ol' Jim was there to greet him: "Hey, Kid!"

"What!"

"There's a posse outside waitin' for ya. Good reward money, y'know." Now the Kid knew what was wrong with Ol' Jim. Ol' Jim couldn't look him in the eye.

"Look at me! Don' trust no man who can't look me in the eye."

Jim laughed. "I'm blind, kid." The Kid reassessed and understood. "In fact, the whole town's blind. Here, have another shot." The Kid wolfed it down.

"A whole town gone blind ? That's peculiar. Well, time to kill me a whole posse," he said. "Oughta be easy, everybody'd bein' blind."

Twenty-seven men, each with a pistol in one hand and a cane in the other, stood a hundred feet from the Kid in the main road of Brown's Hole. Blind, but they had other skills honed all these years.

They had no trouble putting 27 bullets into the Kid, himself newly blind from the methanol, the finest--and only--drink in town.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES:

For Thursday, July 25, Day 207 of the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge

366 WORDS (without A/N)

Title-accompaniment photo was AI-generated but the word choice was not.

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ABOUT THIS STORY:

It occurred to me that I had never, ever written anything in the "Western" genre before. Here's my first. Enjoy, Pahdna!

Then, there's this:

In the US, about 5,000 cases of vision loss due to methanal are diagnosed yearly. The prevalence of methanol intoxication is most common among the lower economic and social demographic groups secondary to the oral consumption of contaminated alcohol from illegal domestic production, (aka, "moonshine" or "bootlegging" from "stills"). Poisoning with methanol and the product of its metabolism—formic acid—is toxic, the optic nerve being especially hypersensitive, causing irreversible blindness (if it doesn't kill you!).

THE CHALLENGE GRINDS ON, 366 WORDS AT A TIME:

There are currently three surviving Vocal writers still participating in the insane 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge:

• L.C. Schäfer, challenge originator

• Rachel Deeming

• Gerard DiLeo (some other guy)

Read them. Support them. And choose your libations carefully.