That Goddamn Hat

Nobody liked the half-breed. If anything, the redskins hated him even more than the white folks. There were posters nailed up in sheriff’s offices throughout the territories calling for Jonah Thunder-Cloud to be brought in dead or alive, but the Indians just wanted him dead.

Jonah’s father was a Sioux medicine man with a fearsome reputation, but his momma was the one who really jinxed him. She was supposed to have been a witch-woman who came West from the Appalachians, but there were some who said that she’d holed up in those mountains after she escaped from the Salem witch trials two hundred years ago. God knows how old she really was, but folks swore she never looked a day over twenty-one in her whole accursed life.

Now, the thing is, this isn’t a tale about Jonah — I only saw him once, and that was when he died. This is the story of his goddamn hat. It was an ugly, floppy thing that seemed to have a life of its own. His parents had given it to him when he’d been cast out of his tribe. The hat was made of a curious kind of buttery leather that looked like tanned human hide. It had a thick band made of glittering rattlesnake skin, and sported three feathers that some said had come from Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of the Aztecs.

I’ve often wondered how bad the half-breed really was. Sure, he killed a lot of men in his brief time on this earth, but nobody ever gave him a chance, let alone a smile or a kind word. The West is a hard place and it breeds hard-hearted men. His hat was a different matter — it was a wicked piece of work from the start.

The man who killed Jonah was undoubtedly an evil son of a bitch. Earl Waxman not only earned his living with his guns, he took an unholy pleasure in it. He’d been tracking the half-breed for months, determined to claim the bounty on Thunder-Cloud’s head, and they settled it in Tombstone.

Now, the people I talked to didn’t think Waxman had a chance against the younger man in a fair fight — the half-breed was faster than anyone they’d ever seen — but just as the two were about to draw, a gust of wind blew the hat off Jonah’s head. Well, that’s sure what it looked like to me, but there wasn’t a breath of air in Tombstone that day. From where I was standing on the boardwalk, it seemed to me as if the damned thing had just decided to take off and fly away.

Jonah looked confused and kept looking that way even after Earl Waxman plugged him right between the eyes. Then the gunslinger sauntered down main street, stepping over the half-breed’s corpse, and caught the hat as it floated down.

After that, the word was that Waxman kept the thing as a trophy, but wouldn’t wear it because it was too small for his big fat head. The funny thing was, the hat fitted him well enough a few weeks later, so either it had stretched or his noggin had shrunk. This little mystery became academic when it slipped over his eyes during a gunfight. They buried him on Boot Hill, right next to Jonah.

The next time I saw the hat was in a barroom in Laramie. It was sitting on an empty stool like it was minding its own business — I soon knew better than that.

“Excuse me, pilgrim,” I said to the man propped up beside it, “is this here stool taken? I’ve ridden a long, long way and I’d sure appreciate a place to sit while I wet my whistle.”

The man turned slowly and smiled so thinly you’d have been hard pushed to slip a stiletto between his lips. “This seat’s reserved, boy, and unless you’d like to fight for it, you can’t take it.”

“Now, I should tell you that I don’t carry a peacemaker,” I said. “I’m a simple hatter by trade and I don’t deal in bullets — I won’t fight you.” I paused for a moment before going on. “Do me one favour, though, tell me where you came by that piece of headgear.”

The grinning man seemed confused for a moment and he scratched at his scabby head.

“None of your business,” he finally decided.

“I’d be mighty careful, pilgrim,” I replied, then I turned my back on him and walked away.

Two days later, I found his corpse at the side of the trail. There was no sign of the hat, but then again, there was no sign of the top of the man’s skull. The scrambled mess of his brains looked chewed.

After that, I kept an eye out for Jonah Thunder-Cloud’s hat. There was something very wrong with it, something ungodly. It spurred men on to do evil and ate up their souls. Then it would literally devour them when they could go no further, fattening itself on its victims’ flesh as well as their spirits.

I heard stories as I travelled and realized that the thing was growing bigger. A wretched woman in Abilene told me that she’d been widowed by a Mexican gunslinger wearing the strangest sombrero she’d ever seen. Some prospectors in the Rockies whispered about a ten-gallon hat that was passed from head to head as a party tried to cross those harsh mountains while winter closed in. Eventually, only one man made it to the other side, scared witless and raving about being pursued by a “riderless” horse carrying only a hat. On a train rolling through Kansas, I met another travelling salesman who told me about a hellish medicine show that destroyed several settlements in Montana, a carnival of death led by a hunchback barker wearing a ludicrously outsized piece of flopping headgear. He didn’t seem so funny, though, when he took it off and let it feast on those he captured.

Then I stopped hearing about Jonah Thunder-Cloud’s hat, but knew that it was still up to no good. I’d kept a note of all the tales that I’d been told, and tried to follow the trail by marking a map of the territories. It seemed obvious to me that the thing had grown so big and bloated that people didn’t recognize it for what it was, but I heard stories that smacked of its mischief.

There was the one about the posse caught in a sandstorm in New Mexico who found a strange tepee made of butter-coloured leather in the desert. They left a guard outside, and the rest went into the tent to get out of the wind. Not one of them came out, but the sand turned scarlet under the tepee’s rippling rim and the sentry fled right back into the storm.

I did what I could to warn people, but it was too tall a tale for most to swallow whole, so I determined that it was up to me to track the thing down for once and for all. As a hatmaker, my whole livelihood was threatened by such an insult to my noble trade. My savings bought me a fast horse, a good rifle and a lot of gunpowder. I rode throughout the territories, following a trail of whispers and tears.

After months of false leads and close shaves, I finally got lucky. A Cheyenne medicine man called Strange Owl caught up with me in Utah. The old Indian was hunting for the goddamn hat too, and had heard of me and my mission. What was more, he had a lead.

“Two stones to kill one bird?” Strange Owl suggested, and I readily agreed. Jonah Thunder-Cloud’s hat mixed Indian bad medicine with Old-World deviltry. It would take the both of us to lay it low. We saddled up and rode for Monument Valley.

Three days later, just as the sun went down, we came to the end of the trail. The high, steep-sided hills called buttes glowed like huge coals and there was an unnatural hush broken only by our horses’ hooves crunching through the dirt… And there, emerging from behind one of the rocky outcrops, was that goddamn hat, bigger than life, as big as the hills themselves.

The sallow slopes of its brim were flushed crimson by the sunset as they rose towards its crown. The snakeskin band glittered and flashed, blinding us for a moment, and the three feathers rose higher than any tree, waving not in the wind but with a life of their own. Then the brim rippled like an ocean wave, and the bones of men and horses scattered like toothpicks in the dirt. I recognized the blue rags fluttering in amongst the skeletons — the monster had eaten an entire company of the Seventh Cavalry.

We rode for the shelter of a deep cleft in a nearby butte. There Strange Owl lit a fire and explained his plan. Even huddled close to the blaze, I shivered at the thought, but I had no better ideas myself. The thing had to be stopped before it went any further.

We left our shelter at dawn, and the old medicine man brandished his ceremonial spear. Its shaft was adorned with the scalps of Jonah Thunder-Cloud’s parents … and a little spice of my own — one part quicksilver to three parts gunpowder. Strange Owl rounded the side of the butte and confronted the goddamn hat, calling to it with a heathen war-cry.

I lit the makeshift fuse with my tinderbox. Then my companion flung his spear straight up into the sky with unnatural strength. Powerful medicine carried the lance out of sight and into the clouds.

The hat let loose a hideous rumble and lurched towards us. Then my charge went off with a bang big enough to wake the dead, and the clouds began to boil. The monstrosity halted, throwing up a fountain of dirt, as the cumuli condensed into a thunderhead, a storm-cloud wearing Jonah’s angry face.

Lightning bolts discharged around the hat and then thunder rolled, a thunderclap that spoke:

“Why have you called me back?”

“Because you left something of yourself behind,” Strange Owl bellowed into the storm.

“What of it?”

“It is a curse on this land!”

“It was a curse on me as well. That hat promised me the  world, but its assurances were lies. It gave me power, but it took it back… Then it took my life as well…”

“Then have your vengeance!” I shouted into the wind. “In the name of the Heavenly Father or the Great Spirit … in the names of the folk it has destroyed … or simply yourself!”

And the black cloud seemed to smile. Lightning forked and split again as the thunderhead scribbled a great electrical body into being. Then two vast crackling hands reached out, clasping the crisping flesh of the hat, and Jonah donned his headgear for the final time.

Strange Owl and I watched as Thunder-Cloud’s ghost stalked off into the South, his screaming hat burning on his billowing head and his lightning-bolt legs leaving smoking tracks behind him.

Now some folks say that the mercury I use in my trade has addled my brains, and that they’ll eat their hats if this tale is true. Pilgrims, think what you will, but beware unless your hat eats you…

Remember, friends, all my wares are guaranteed to stay in their place and behave themselves as they should.