Ghost Town: A Novel (14 page)

The fat man squints expressionlessly down the barrel of the pistol, dragging slowly on the cigarillo, his hands tensed on his knees. Yu rather hold over me, podnuh. I reckon I caint call thet hand. Ash blows from the reddening cigarillo in the coiling wind. Ante’n pass the buck.

The buck aint fer passin, puffguts, and the ante’s yer ass, says the bearded hunchback, cocking the hammer of his pistol.

He gets up from where he’s been lying against the black mare, walks over there, ready to shoot them both if he has to, at the same time that the bandit queen climbs down off the pile of loot and interposes herself between them, her tasseled sombrero tipped sternly down over one brow as if to say she means business. We aint got time fer no hossshit bickerin, boys, she says, cuffing their ears so sharply she knocks their hats off. He reaches down and takes the hunchback’s gun away from him, uncocks it, empties the chamber, drops it back in his lap. Now I want yu two bigmouth jackasses t’shake’n make up.

Aw Belle…

C’mon now, aint no point argufyin the question, she says, giving them another slap. Thet train’s due by here any minnit. Yu in this gang or aint yu?

Ow! Shore, Belle, but—

Then git to it.

Well. Well awright, dammit, I’m sorry I shot yer bud. It wuz jest I wuz so wound up awaitin fer thet cussed train.

It dont matter none. T’tell the truth I couldnt hardly suffer thet dandified turkeyass anyhow.

Thet’s a whole sight better, boys, says the bandit queen, ruffling their hair, and she climbs back up on the loot and tunes up her guitar, while he rests down against the mare again, fingering the gold ring that Belle stole earlier for the bullet hole in his ear and reflecting, as he watches the stars get whipped about by the winds, on the way his own days seem to blow past him out here as though on those winds, and his memory of them, too, swept away as if they never were, leaving only a lingering constellation of habits and impressions that constitutes his dim untidy notion of himself; and constellations, as a crusty old scout once pointed out to him, do not really exist but are merely the local illusion of earthbound ramblers. That’s what he said, and it seems likely so. Which means he knows nothing, and sometimes less than that when confusions beset him. One impression that the day has given him, for example, is that he probably takes more favorably to breaking the law than to preserving it, but that preference is muddied by a troubling disquiet of the heart, the nature of which he suspects but cannot quite take in, for he has always known himself to be—by trade, druthers, and constitution—a free man and a drifter and a loner, not susceptible to such perturbations. But all that was before he laid eyes on the town schoolmarm. He can still see her, tied to the railroad tracks, so sad and sweet and needful a creature wriggling around down there. In short, his constellated notion of himself be damned, he may well be (though that’s just it, he can’t be) in love, and here, astray outside the law, it’s a love utterly denied him. Them rails hummin yet? Belle asks.

An eye-patched mestizo with long black greasy hair puts his one ear to the rail that he’s been squatting on. Nope. Nuthin.

Mebbe these aint the right ones, says a bandy-legged old gray-beard in a red undershirt and black derby. Mebbe these’re jest more false tracks thet goldang train has laid down t’throw us offn its trail.

The black mare behind him lifts her head and shakes it with a dissentious snort. Them’s the tracks, ole man, he says quietly, patting the mare’s shoulder. Dont git antsy. It’ll be here soon enuf.

To bide the waiting time and calm this restless bunch of high-tempered roadriders, Belle sings old campmeeting favorites about destiny and fast guns, potency and freedom (Sumthin howlin sumthin prowlin black’n hairy on the prairie, she warbles into the dark windy night, the ruby in her cheek so lit up from the campfire it seems more like a window to a furnace in her mouth), and at the end (Space without end! Aymen! Aymen!) he and the men all join in by throwing their heads back and emitting long mournful howls, which seem to enter into the winds and become part of them and spread over the dimly glowing landscape as though to blanket it with the foggy ache of their unrealized desires.

Slowly the howls fade into the distance, carried away by the departing winds, and in the dense silence that follows, the stringy-haired mestizo puts his ear to the tracks and raises his hand and whispers: It’s comin!

Hastily, they stamp out the fire and don their masks and mount their horses: they can hear it now, wailing dolefully in the distance, as though returning their own howls, and heading this way. He steps the black mare into the middle of the track bed to block the train’s passage and also to nail the skittery rails in place, and the others gather around him, pistols and rifles out, waiting for whatever happens next. The roar augments, the steam whistle bawls, they can hear the rhythmic clatter of the steel wheels drawing ever nearer, but as yet no sign of the train itself.

We should oughter be seein its light, someone says, and suddenly everything goes silent.

Whut—
? Whar’d it go?

Sshh!

They stand there in the dead of night, huddled together on their horses atop the short stretch of rails they’ve secured, scanning the pale empty horizon, nothing to be heard but their own breathing and the occasional stamp of a hoof, someone sucking nervously on a loose tooth. And then, as suddenly as the silence fell, the train is thundering up on them, its whistle shrieking, its headlight swinging above them like a diabolical pendulum, fire belching from its stack, sparks flying from the pounding wheels. Horses rear, riders tumble, some scream and run, but he and the mare stand fast and the train vanishes again. Silence and darkness fall, even deeper than before.

While the other men, mumbling curses, brush themselves off and crawl back onto their horses, the bandit queen sidles up to him on her golden palomino and says: Whuddayu reckon?

Dunno. Must be hidin from us. Tryin to.

It aint got past?

No. It’s out thar. Sumwhars. Slowly his eyes, temporarily blinded by the locomotive’s headlamp, adjust to the darkness, and he searches the bleak scene for any irregularity which might conceal so great a thing. Mostly just dark clumps of sage, scrub, out-croppings of pale rocks.

Whut about thet ole abandoned silver mine?

Silver mine?

Over thar. In thet little cleft this side a thet far butte. See the black hole? It’s deep and it’s got rails down it coulda used.

He nods. Aint nuthin else t’choose from. He turns to the old graybeard. Yu stay here, oletimer, and mind them tracks dont sneak off sumwhars. The resta yu men come with me.

It’s a fair gallop across the vast flat desert to the silver mine, but they cover it in due time, or rather in no time at all, for it seems he’s still contemplating the distance they have to travel when they are pulling up at the mouth of the mine on sweaty frothing horses to ponder their next move.

It’s down thar awright, whispers one of the men. I kin hear it wheezin.

So, uh, whuddawe gonna do, kid? It’s the trigger-happy humpback, now wearing the wire-rimmed specs on his bulbous nose, the two black disks pupilled each by a reflected star.

Pears we got no choice. The train’s gone down thet hole. Ifn we wanta rob it, we gotta go down thar too.

Unh-hunh. Well. Yu’re probly right. His gnarled hand digs deep into his beard, scratching at the roots. He looks around at the others.
Sumbody
should likely oughter go down thar.

The men of the gang, half-circling around, stare at him sullenly in the darkness. There is a lengthy silence, broken only by the train engine letting off a bit of steam deep in the earth. Awright, he says finally. But shares accordin. There’s some grumbling, but Belle says: Shore. Heck. Thet’s fair.

As he steps the mare toward the mine shaft, however, she rears and balks, forcing him to dismount (better to go in on foot anyway, he reasons, allows for a better chance of ducking out of its way should it come cannonballing up out of there), then plants her body lengthways in front of the black mouth of the tunnel, blocking his way down. She snorts pleadingly, rubbing her nose against his buckskin shirt, forcing him back. He steadies himself, one arm over her withers, and whispers into her lowered ear, twitching in front of his nose as if trying to flick flies off it: It’s awright. Aint nuthin down thar but a ole gully jumper gone off its rails. And anyhow, shoot. Yu know. I aint got no choice.

Once, long ago—he remembers this now as he pushes past the distressed mare and steps into the ink-black mine shaft, blindly feeling his way and as though possessed by some unspoken obligement he does not even recognize—he won a woman in a game of stud poker, one of the sort Belle was singing about earlier. She was, as they said about such women, a nymph of the prairie who had killed a lot of men by charming them to death, so there was a price on her head and bounty hunters were after her. In fact he was himself a bounty hunter at that time, so what in effect he had won was a hundred dollars. His problem was hauling her up to the next fort and cashing her in before rival bounty hunters got to her, so instead of killing her straight off and having to drag her dead weight around, he figured that it was better to keep her on the hoof until he could safely collect. He figured wrong. Should have known better, he was not ignorant of her reputation, but he was young then, and reckless (as if he’d grown any wiser: look where he is now), and untutored in the witching ways of professional prairie nymphs. It was said that she cast her necromantic spells through some ancient member-rubbing metaphysic, so as precaution he strapped a holster betwixt his legs and pulled on an extra pair of pants backwards, then gagged her and tied her hands behind her back. Of course that meant he had to feed and clean her, which tasks led him to the discovery that there were other sorcerous parts of her, and not least her eyes, which never ceased to fix their gaze upon him, a savage gaze, for she was of mixed breed, yet a gaze of such seeming purity and natural goodness that eventually it was all that he could see and he was in her power and she was unbound and practicing her murderous skills upon him. The days that followed blurred into a ceaseless present and, as he felt his life essence draining out of him, he lost all sense of time. And place: even the landscape seemed to change, acquiring a roseate glow, which glow in the end was all that he could see, the intensity of his pleasure, which was also pain, dissolving the world’s salients, dips, and bends into a single throbbing rubescent surface that encircled him much as does now this tunnel down which he gropes, itself now also red and pulsing, though that pounding pulse may only be his own, as it no doubt was then, and the redness an illusion cast upon his eyes by the absolute blackness of the mine. Or are now and then the true illusions and is he still in fact ensorcelled, this powerless sinking into the bowels of the earth the nymph’s wry theatrical farewell? Perhaps, and yet he seems to recall a sequel, in which, somehow, through force of youthful will, he escaped her dark enchantment and, though almost too weak to stand, subdued and bound her up once more and blindfolded her as well and sought out in the town wherein he soon found himself a preacher who might break the spell. Well, said the preacher, looking her over with his tired yellow eyes, we could tote her down to the river’n try baptizin her. Yu reckon, revrend? Seems a mite tame. The way I baptize em, son, said the preacher with a thin black smile, it either takes or we bury em. So he left her with him and went to the saloon across the way to recover some of his natural vitality. There some men joined him and affably offered to let him buy them a drink and asked him about the light-o’-love he’d towed in, trussed up like a mountain cat set for a skinning, and he freely told them about her, as they were unarmed and lacked ambition beyond the whiskey remaining in the bottle. So yu turned her over t’thet thar ranter whut runs the gospel-mill crost the street? I done so. He figgered he could unwitch her with a theologie river-duckin. Well, pard, I think yu jest lost yerself a hunderd bucks. Thet feller might be a aymen-snortin pulpit banger on Sundays but rest a the time they aint a more robustious hard-shelled bounty hunter in the Terrortory. He sat there taking in these ungratifying tidings, feeling his juices starting to churn once more but unable as yet to set his limbs in adequate motion. Tell me then, he said. Whut day’s t’day? Dunno, but it aint Sunday lest thet gospel shark sez it is. So, though putting one leg in front of the other still required considerable effort, he took his rifle and went looking for the preacher and found him naked and sucked down to skin and bone and floating face-down in the river. Never saw the prairie nymph again but he’s never been certain that he is shut of her, for she left him full of doubts about the world he walks and about himself and what is real and what is of her conjuring.

The train coughs suddenly, quite nearby, startling him, and he presses back against the glowing tunnel wall, but only silence follows. As, cautiously, he edges forward again, it occurs to him (the red walls remind him so: yes, they are no illusion) that his fears of its roaring out and running him down have been for naught, for of course the train has ducked down here cowcatcher first and cannot turn around, that red glow being provided by its caboose lantern. Which, as he rounds a falling bend, he sees, rocking faintly to and fro from the heaving tremors of the trapped engine down at the other end. It cowers there, nose buried in the narrowing tunnel like a whipped puppy trying to hide in a boot.

Well well, he says. Whut deepot’s this?

The train lets off an explosive burst of steam and sets its whistle shrieking, its bells clanging, but it’s all empty bravado.

He waits for it to cool down and then he says: They aint no way outa here, y’know, cept backin out tailfirst through the hole yu come in. It’s all uphill, yu caint git up no speed, and they’s a passel a bodaciously wicked desperadoes up thar jest itchin t’take yu apart rivet by rivet when yu come crawlin out. So I reckon the best thing fer yu t’do is give up yer goods right here and go peaceful.