Coiled Snake Inn

It hangs there, the sign, you know, like in the movies. A bullet hole through the centre of the o. Peeling green paint and its corking curls. The left hand chain rusted through, swinging loose, free. The sign cockahoop and clanking.

She digs wax out of her ear and rolls the soft orange yellow into a ball between her thumb and forefinger. Flicks it to the ground with a spit and a whistle. Squeezes her thighs into the horse’s flanks. She hadn’t meant to bring the gun, not this time. Christ, she barely knows how to hold the thing never mind load it but she’d said, her mother had said, ‘Laura he’s dangerous, that husband of yours,’ and so she’d saddled up, grabbed the gun from her father’s safe, and ridden into town cloppety clop, clippety clip.

Grit blows up into her eyes, she rubs, rubs again, the sun is a pink scald on the back of her neck, and she is across the road from Coiled Snake Inn with its o shot out and its S bleached out and the dot above the i lost in a crack or a flake or a gun blast or maybe all three.

Picture the scene. An empty dirt street lined with wooden shacks and their wildly-painted jaunty lean-tos, a dark-haired woman with thin lips and a smooth moustache in a blue check shirt astride a palomino or a bay or a fleet-bitten grey, take your pick, her gunpowder eyes fixed on the batwing doors of the only saloon in town, a bunch of tumbleweed rolling on past (that perfect gif), the rifle loose in her lap, the horse dancing, up on its toes, cloppety clop, clippety clip.

The tumbleweed is in amongst the horse’s hooves and the horse rears and Laura drops the rifle, metal on metal as the gun and horseshoes spark and clash, there’s a shout and a scream, the audience grabbing at each other in the dark, sucking salt sweet popcorn into gloating cheeks, a middle-aged woman choking on a Malteser, actually properly choking, CALL AN AMBULANCE someone’s shouting in the velvet pitch of the old town cinema, the one with the horses tethered outside, even someone’s pig, I mean Jesus H Christ who brings their pig to the movies?

The truth is Pete Crab Feet wanted to bring the sow in, even offered to pay her ticket, ‘Come on, love,’ he’d drawled to the usher ‘she’ll sit on my lap Daisy she’s as good as old gold,’ and the usher saw red and banned them both and now there’s Daisy and Pete Crab Feet both haltered up on the railings outside the One Tree Dominion in amongst the horses, and inside the woman who chokes on the Malteser has heaved it out with venom-spiked phlegm.

Laura’s horse is rearing up and bashing its pure white head on the Coiled Snake Inn sign with the o shot out and the sign falls with an alrighty clatter and the audience roars and Laura’s man staggers out through the batwing doors, out of the saloon, out into the platinum scald of the afternoon, bow-legged and randy-eyed and he trips over the unloaded gun and falls under the flashing hooves of the rearing wall-eyed horse and takes a fatal blow to the head and the cinema audience roars and cheers and the usher shouts LIGHTS UP FOR ICE-CREAM SALES.

Wrapper rustles fade out, the light dims, the audience shifts and shuffles, eyes blink and pupils adjust, the usher heaves open the plum velvet curtains and there’s Laura on the dirt eye to eye with the dead man who raises an arm, raises a fist, a flash of steel, and Laura’s horse drops to its knees, down on the road, puts itself between the dagger and sweet Laura and the audience sucks in an audience-size breath and there’s a pig-shaped squeal and in bursts Daisy, Daisy the sow, Daisy settling herself in the front row in the best seat, directly in front of Malteser woman right at the critical point and someone’s calling the manager, the usher, anyone, and on-screen there’s blood all over the horse’s white head, and Daisy the sow has found the choked out Malteser and has sucked it straight up her left nostril, all attention’s on the pig, what do you know, what do you know?

Credits roll.