Cloud of Sparrows (40 page)

“No, we do not,” Taro said. Enthusiasm returned to his voice. “They are profoundly apparent. They do not require false amplification.”

“In any case, how important is something as superficial as outer beauty?” Hidé moved the conversation to safer ground. “What really matters is the beauty within. There, Lady Emily is second to none.”

“You have clearly expressed the key point,” Taro said, much relieved by the shift in focus. “True beauty lies within.”

The two samurai smiled happily as they sat on their horses and kept watch over their lord and Lady Emily. Between them, they had resolved an important issue. Now they knew how to think about an important person who did not quite fit into the usual order.

Heiko said, “You did not mention the details of our journey to Lord Genji.”

Stark said, “He didn’t ask.”

They sat in chairs in a room overlooking one of the castle’s inner gardens. It was one of several furnished to meet Emily and Stark’s needs. This particular room was crowded with six chairs, four tables, a large couch, a writing desk, and two dressers. Outsiders were unlike Japanese. What they thought was good, Japanese thought was bad, and vice versa. Genji’s servants took this as their guiding principle. In their zeal to make the honored guests feel at home, they did for them the opposite of what they did for their lord. Where he had much space and few furnishings, the guests had many furnishings and little space. The servants exerted themselves to the utmost to create an environment completely unlike one in which they themselves would be comfortable. In this they had succeeded admirably.

“I intend to tell him myself,” Heiko said, “today.”

“Your secret’s still your secret,” Stark said. “I’m not saying anything.”

“Thank you for your restraint. I appreciate it very much. Secrets are impossible to keep. You will not speak of it, I know. But word of the fight at the barricade will eventually reach Lord Genji. He will realize the truth.”

“Will that cause problems?”

“Yes, I believe it will.”

“He doesn’t know about your other skills.”

“No.”

“Why did you use them?” Stark said. “We might have sneaked through okay, and if we didn’t, I would have shot our way through. Swords are no match for a six-gun.”

“I could not put your life at risk any more than I had to. Before he died, Lord Genji’s grandfather made a prophecy. He said an outsider Lord Genji meets in the New Year will save his life. I was certain you were the one.”

“If I was, then nothing would have happened. I had to live to do what the prophecy said I would do. If I died, then I wasn’t who you were waiting for. Nothing lost.”

“Prophecies cannot be trusted to fulfill themselves,” Heiko said. “Without our most sincere efforts, the outcome may be much different from what we hope for. If you were the outsider intended to save him, but were killed before you could do it, then another would have come forward. But not the right outsider. Lord Genji would live, because the prophecy said he would. But he might be maimed or crippled or put into a coma.”

“Is that how it works?” Stark said. He didn’t believe any of this. But she wanted to talk, so he listened. “How did Lord Genji’s grandfather get into the prophecy business?”

“He was born with the gift of foresight. He had many visions throughout his life.”

“Was he always right?”

“He was.”

“Why didn’t he tell everyone it was Emily?”

“Visions are always incomplete. Though life is preordained, its precise unfolding depends on what we do. Past karma determines the first. Present karma the second.”

“Karma?”

“Perhaps your word is fate, but a living, constantly changing fate.”

“Fate is fate,” Stark said. “It’s there. It doesn’t change. We just don’t see it until we walk into it. Or it walks into us.”

Sometimes, when Stark was in the vicinity of El Paso, he’d stop by Manual Cruz’s establishment, which had the best dozen whores in Texas, according to its proprietor. Stark never actually counted more than eight at any one time. As far as he could tell, none was better than whores anywhere else in town, much less the state.

“Poetic license,” Cruz said. “Picks a man up. Puts him in an optimistic frame of mind. Good for him. Good for business.”

“What’s poetic license?”

“You come here for a lesson in the intricacies of language, boy, or to get screwed, glued, and tattooed?”

“I came to fuck a whore,” Stark said, “not to get anything affixed.”

“Literal-minded cuss, aren’t you?” Ethan said. Ethan was Cruz’s adopted son. He wore his gun low on his hip the way Stark did, and kept his shoulders relaxed the same way. One day, Ethan would figure out he was Matthew Stark, the gunfighter with the big reputation, and call him out. Or he would figure out that he and Stark were in the same line of work and suggest a partnership. One or the other, one of these days.

Cruz laughed. “Go ahead. Take a good look and make your best selection.”

Stark didn’t patronize Cruz’s establishment because of the superior quality of its merchandise. He went there because it was the one closest to the edge of town. Towns made his chest and throat tight. He didn’t go into them any more than he had to.

If location was what recommended the place, it was also what kept him away most of the time. He couldn’t stand the rank odor of the pigsty next door. In that regard, he appeared to be in the minority. Cruz always had more business when the prevailing wind came toward the bar than when it blew away from it. Which was fine as far as Stark was concerned. The only thing he disliked more in a whorehouse than the stench of pigs was a crowd of fornicating drunks. He always checked the wind when he rode into El Paso, and so never had to deal with either.

He wasn’t sentimental. He didn’t have a favorite whore. He was twenty years old, and he’d killed three more men in gunfights since he’d killed Jimmy So Fast, and he didn’t know if he’d live to be twenty-one. No one had come after him in over a year, but he wasn’t fool enough to think that meant no one would. He gave four bits to Cruz and took the closest of the best dozen upstairs.

That time, which was the second to the last time he ever went to Cruz’s, it happened to be Mary Anne.

She was nothing special, except she was older than the others, older than any he’d been with. She was kinder, too, and when he spilled himself all over her thigh before he could get inside her, she shushed him, and held him close, and told him to rest awhile, it was okay, he could give it another go without giving Cruz another four bits. He told her it was always hard to hold it in the first time off the trail, he was with a woman so infrequently was the reason. She said shush and just held him until he was ready.

When he was finished he must have fallen asleep because what he did next was wake up. A dim lamp burned on the table. Mary Anne was asleep next to him. The wind being the way it was, blowing from the wrong direction, business was slow. She was in no hurry to go back downstairs and sit in a hard chair in an empty bar.

He had to piss. He turned to get out of bed and saw two little girls staring at him. They stood right up next to the bed. The littler one, she couldn’t have been more than four or five, had her thumb in her mouth. The other one, older by a couple of years, had a protective arm around her sister’s shoulder. He could tell they were sisters by the family resemblance. He knew whose daughters they were the same way. The sheet hanging from a pole on the other side of the room had been spread out when he’d gone to bed with Mary Anne. Now it was pulled back and he could see the little bed on the other side.

“Hi, there,” Stark said. How was he going to talk them into turning away so he could get his pants on?

“We didn’t know anyone was here,” the older girl said. “It was quiet.”

“I’ll be going as soon as I can get dressed,” Stark said.

The younger girl picked his pants up from the chair and brought them to him.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” the older one said for her.

He looked back at Mary Anne, thinking the sound of voices would wake her. No such luck. She was a very sound sleeper.

“We were sleeping,” the older girl said, “but Louise woke up thirsty, so I was going with her to get a drink of water.”

“You’re a good girl,” Stark said, “to be looking after your little sister that way.”

“Even when we’re not sleeping,” the older girl said, “nobody knows we’re there. We’re quiet as church mice, so our mommy can do her job.”

“You’re always behind the sheet?”

“No, silly. We go to Mrs. Crenshaw’s house during the day, excepting Saturdays and Sundays. On Sundays we go to Sunday school at the church.” She looked at her alcove and looked back at Stark and giggled. “How could we stay in that itty bitty space all the time?”

“Why aren’t you at Mrs. Crenshaw’s now?”

“Because it’s nighttime, and it’s Saturday.” This time, both girls giggled. “Don’t you even know what day it is?”

“Becky, Louise, what are you doing up?” Mary Anne lifted her sleepy head from the pillow.

“Louise is thirsty, Mommy.”

“Then give her some water and go back to bed.”

“Yes, Mommy. ’Bye, mister.”

“’Bye.” Stark got up and put on his pants as soon as they were out the door. “They’re not going down to the bar, are they?”

“Sure. That’s where the water is.”

“You could keep a pitcher in your room. Right there by their bed.”

“They don’t want that.” Mary Anne rolled over on her back with the sheet pulled up demurely around her neck and watched him dress. “They think the smell of pigs gets in the water and makes it dirty.”

Stark didn’t want to say it, it was none of his business. But he said, “This is no place for kids.”

“This is no place for me, either,” Mary Anne said, “but here they are, and here I am. There are worse. Cruz lets them stay with me, and nobody bothers them. That’s something to be grateful for. He says he doesn’t abide pederasts, and he means it.”

“What’s a pederast?”

“One who takes pleasure in molesting a child.”

Stark remembered the orphanage and the surprised look in the night supervisor’s dead eyes after Stark cracked his skull open with a hammer. “I don’t abide pederasts either.”

“You don’t have to leave. They’ll drink their water and go back to sleep.”

“I hear voices,” Stark said, listening to the laughter in the bar. “Customers.”

“More than enough girls to handle whoever’s there.” Mary Anne took a deep breath. “I get lazy when the east wind blows. The air’s so nice, and there aren’t many visitors.”

Stark took another four bits out of his pocket and put it on the table next to the lamp.

“I told you, you don’t have to pay for the second time. It was really the first time, if you think about it.” She smiled at him. It wasn’t the kind of smile a whore smiled when she was making fun of you or when she was trying to trick you out of more money. It was a nice smile.

“I’m going down to Mexico to work a mine,” Stark said. He was actually on his way to Missouri to rob more banks. He thought it might make a better impression if he didn’t say so right out, before he really knew her. “I’ll be back in the spring.”

“I’ll be here,” Mary Anne said.

It was the first time Stark had ever lied to a whore. There wasn’t any reason to before. Why did he want to make a good impression on Mary Anne? Because she was the mother of two children? That was a damned foolish reason, if that’s what it was. Nothing holy about motherhood. His own mother, her identity forever unknown to him, had left his infant self on the steps of a church in Columbus, Ohio, wrapped in a blanket and with nothing else, not even a name. He got Matthew because that was the Apostle next on the name list. He didn’t know how he got Stark. He had no soft spot for mothers. Maybe it was because Mary Anne was kind and had a nice smile. Maybe it was because Becky and Louise were cute little girls who didn’t belong in a whorehouse. Those were damned foolish reasons, too. Stark had no fondness for children, not even memories of himself as one.

It was the first time he’d lied to a whore, and it was also the first time he’d told a whore he’d come back to see her. He thought that was his second lie, after the one about going to Mexico to work in a mine.

But it turned out he was telling the truth when he told what he thought was his second lie. Mary Anne and Becky and Louise were on his mind all the time he was in Missouri. He was thinking about them at the wrong time in the bank in Joplin and almost got his head blown off by a farmer with a shotgun, except the shotgun shell misfired and Stark shot the farmer in the leg. He didn’t get any money, and he also didn’t get killed. The posse from Joplin was still on his trail when he reached the Texas panhandle. Those were some stubborn men in Missouri. He didn’t have any of their money, and they were still chasing him two states away. He made a decision during that long ride. He decided to go see Mary Anne and try to figure out why he was still thinking about her and Becky and Louise.

“See what I mean?” Cruz said when Stark walked in the door. “Poetic license puts a man in an optimistic frame of mind. The wind’s blowing the wrong way for you, yet your spirit’s picked up. I mean a deep thing when I say these are the best dozen whores in Texas.”