Gun Work: The Further Exploits of Hayden Tilden Read Online Free PDF

arteries hardening, or anything medical at all. Nope, a ghost from the man’s past got him. Sure as pissants can’t pull boxcars.

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    â€œ. . . DIED OF THE CONSUMPTION . . .”
    MIGHT AS WELL get comfortable, folks. Gonna tell you a little story designed to further illustrate an old man’s unsupported nightly ramblings about life and the past. See, six or eight months ago the wardens here at Rolling Hills took to dragging a hundred-year-old projector into the dayroom on Wednesday nights and running picture shows.
    Bullet-headed, muscle-bound orderly name of Elton Slater works that clattering piece of machinery. Elton’s about half as smart as a bag of stink bugs, but it appears he’s the only guy on staff with brains enough to keep the contraption spinning all its squawking wheels and them pulleys what make that kaflutta-kaflutta-kaflutta sound. Borders nigh on to impossible for me to understand, because the man’s just about half smart enough to put dents in a steel marble with a rubber hammer.
    Anyway, Chief Nurse Leona Wildbank has all the working nurses, candy stripers, and a troop of other kindhearted volunteers wheel us inmates out of our individual cells, about seven o’clock on “movie” night. Before the lights go out and the film cranks up, they serve us cold drinks, candy bars, and popped corn.
    Now it’s damned difficult to eat popped corn when you’re almost ninety and ain’t exactly got all of your teeth. But, Lord, I do love the stuff, especially if it’s drowning in an ocean of hot, melted butter and salty goodness. So, in spite of the fact that I’ve retained about enough of my choppers to fool most folks, I take a paper bag of that wonderful stuff and just spend the evening sucking on it, one kernel at a time.
    Will confess here that I never had the opportunity to indulge in such mindless entertainment, back when I still carried a pistol on each hip, another at my back, a Winchester model 1876 hunting rifle, and a sawed-off shotgun when things got real serious. Back in them blood-spattered days, I chased killers, thieves, bootleggers, and whores all over the Indian Nations for Judge Isaac C. Parker—man known far and wide for quick trials and quicker hangings. ’Course I guess to be completely accurate, the motion picture business, as mass entertainment, didn’t get going real good till after I’d left the U.S. Marshals Service and was toting a badge as a city law bringer down in Sunset, Texas, back in the 1920s.
    And you know, in spite of my best guesswork and feelings on the subject beforehand, I have to admit it’s got to where I kind of enjoy these weekly diversions. Seems as how sitting in the dark, sucking on popped corn and watching one of those flicker shows, has the power to take my near century-old, cankered mind off the fact that I had to give up so much of my personal freedom just to live in this goddamned place.
    Best part of the whole Wednesday-night-picture-show experience and all was when I met up with Martha Frances Harrison. Seems the pair of us had committed ourselves to Rolling Hills at about the same time. Pretty sure we just kind of drifted together because neither of us knew anyone else living here back then.
    Truth is, ain’t many men as reside in one of these homes for the terminally aged to begin with. Reason’s simple enough, really. See, on average, the women outlive us gummers, geezers, and old coots by decades. Seems us guys tend to croak faster than Satan can open Hell’s front gates and invite us to come on in.
    As a consequence of our collective rapid departure from this life, any of us ole farts sporting half a functioning brain, and can walk and chew gum at the same time, can have his choice of female companionship in one of these waiting rooms for the hereafter. And trust me when I tell you that, even though such a situation sounds good on the surface, this particular proposition