Nothing but Gossip by Marne Davis Kellogg Read Free Book Online

can get their pitcher took for twenty-five dollars. Each. And my new favorite: Ye Olde Video Arcadie.
    “Doesn’t it ever bother you, Buck,” I said, as I joined him in his regular booth in the saloon for a quick cup of Ecstasy’s coffee and a warm bear claw before heading upstairs to my office, “that all this Ye Olde stuff is more Richard the First than Victoria?”
    “Nah.” Buck tossed down his first shot of Jack Daniel’s, daintily blotted his gray-flecked moustache with a clean, ironed handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans, and took a big bite of pancakes and sausage and syrup. “These people could care less. It wouldn’t make any difference if Alan King or Larry King or even King Arthur himself came up and whacked them over the head with a jousting lance. All they want to know is, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ That’s why I put two million into all these fancy Johns. People have been driving, kids screaming, hot as hell—‘Where’s the bathroom?’ ”
    It was true, too. Bennett’s Fort’s dirt street, gee-gawed storefront façades and shoppes were old-fashioned-looking and historically correct (depending on whose history you chose to follow), but downstairs, underlying the entire town, were restrooms so clean and sparkling and modern that
Architectural Digest
had done a feature on them. Buck had been hoping for a cover story.
    Of course, as with everything in Bennett’s Fort, nothing was free. You had to show the restroom attendant a receipt for a minimum five-dollar purchase in a Bennett’s Fort emporium before she’d let you in. Sometimes,in the summer, it got so crowded, people would be lined up in the street waiting to get into the restrooms, holding their five-dollar cups of sasparilly as if they were specimen cups for some huge insurance-plan physical. Children under twelve got in free.
    “Let’s get some more Java going over here, sugar,” Buck called over to Ecstasy, his fifty-year-old burned-out hippie sister-in-law, who shuffled across in her Earth Shoe sandals, dirty gray hair clamped into a stringy ponytail at the nape of her turkey neck.
    “Hey, Lil.” She smiled at me, her teeth as brown and big as fence posts, her vacant face a hundred years old. She’d surrendered her brain to LSD at a Steppenwolf concert back there in Boulder in ’sixty-eight, and it had taken her someplace very, very weird and scary and aged her overnight. Her husband, Buck’s brother Bill, was so gone he now spent most of the year in the barn untangling the Christmas lights until it was time to put them up again.
    “Hey, Ec.” I smiled back as she shuffled home to her stool behind the bar and “Good Morning America.”
    Suddenly a crash and some scraping sounds thundered from my offices upstairs. Dust fell from the ceiling in long, thin, curtains, like scrims in a theater.
    “What’s that girl up to now?” Buck squinted at the ceiling. He was referring to my secretary, Linda Long, whose pants he was always trying to think of a way to get into, but my brother Elias had beaten him to it.
    “Who knows?” I shrugged. “She’s always moving things around. So what’s up for you today?” I was trying to decide if I should join him in a shot of sour mash. It smelled delicious.
    “Got that Redford crew rolling in any minute.” He looked at his watch, a stainless-steel Seiko he’d worn since Vietnam. “They start shooting tomorrow.”
    In the off-season, which was basically the nine months between Labor Day and Memorial Day, with the exception of a few weeks at Christmas, Buck rented out the town to movie producers for an insane amount of money. Today Robert Redford’s company would arrive to shoot a socially conscious, politically correct, old-time Western about cowboys who treated women as equals and believed that no meant no. And Indian braves who killed four-thousand-pound buffalo with slingshots and bows and arrows and would never, ever, consider driving a thousand head of them at a