Hart & Boot & Other Stories (3 page)

She missed John Boot a little, but if his leaving could help get her get out of prison, it was worth it. The warden told Pearl that, with John Boot’s influence lifted, she was blossoming into a fine young woman. Two months after John Boot “escaped,” the warden and his wife came to visit Pearl again, both of them smiling like cowboys in a whorehouse. “The governor’s coming to inspect the prison soon, Pearl,” the warden said. “I’ve talked to him about your case, discussed the possibility of giving you a pardon and an early release... and he wants to meet with you.”

“That would be just fine,” Pearl said demurely, thinking,
Hot damn! About time!

***

The governor came into her cell, middle-aged and serious. He wore a nice gray suit and boots with swirling patterns in the leather. The warden and his wife introduced him to Pearl, then stood off to the side, beaming at their new favorite prisoner. The governor looked at them, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Could I have a little time alone with Miss Hart, to discuss her situation?” The warden and his wife practically fell over themselves getting out the door. The governor stood up and closed the cell door. “A little privacy,” he said.

“Sir, I’m so glad you decided to meet with me,” Pearl began. She’d been practicing this speech for days. It had loads of respect, repentance, and a fair bit about Jesus. If it didn’t get her a pardon, nothing would.

“Yes, well,” he said, interrupting her. He took a pocket watch from his vest, looked at it, and frowned. Then he looked Pearl up and down, and grunted. “How bad do you want a pardon, girl?”

Pearl kept smiling, though she didn’t like that look in his eyes. “Very much, Governor, I’ve learned my lesson, I —”

“Listen, little girl, that’s enough talking. I don’t care how sorry you are for what you’ve done. You’re in the worst goddamn place in the whole desert, of course you’re sorry, even a rattlesnake would repent his sinful ways if he got locked up here. Now I don’t have a whole lot of
time
. There’s one way for you to get a pardon, and it doesn’t have anything to do with talking, if you see what I mean.”

Pearl stared at him, her eyes narrowed.

He looked at his watch again. “Look, you can just bend over your bunk there, you don’t even need to take off your dress, I’ll just lift it up.”

“You go to hell, you bastard,” Pearl said, crossing her arms. If he tried to touch her, she’d put a hurt on him like he’d never felt before. She almost hoped he did touch her. The governor was just like all the others, like her husband, like all the men before she’d met John Boot. Boot seemed like just about the only good man in the whole world, and she’d pretty much had to make him up out of her own mind, hadn’t she?

The governor went white in the face, then red. “You’re going to rot here, Miss Hart. You could’ve given me five minutes of your time, done what you’ve probably done with hundreds of filthy men, and been free. But instead—”

“I may’ve done it with filthy men,” Pearl said, “but I’ve never done it yet with a nasty old pig like you.”

The governor rapped on the door, and a guard came to let him out. He left without a word. The warden and his wife bustled in soon after and asked how it went. Pearl thought about telling them, but what was the use?

“It went just fine,” she said.

That night, for the first time in years, Pearl cried.

***

Pearl dreamed of lying in her old bedroom in Canada, giving birth. The baby slid out painlessly, crying, and she picked it up, unsure how to hold it, wrinkling her nose in distaste. The baby looked like a miniature version of the governor, with piercing eyes and grim lines around his mouth. The baby’s tongue slid out, over its lips, and Pearl hurled the thing away in disgust. It hit the knotty pine wall and bounced. When it landed, its face had changed, and John Boot’s eyes regarded her sadly.

Pearl sat up in the dark of her cell, shivering, but not because the dream disturbed her. She shivered with excitement, because she saw a possibility, a chance at a way out.

She lay back down and thought fondly of John Boot, her wonderful John Boot, her lover, her companion, calling to him in her mind.

Nothing happened, except for time passing, and Pearl’s frustration rising. Finally she fell asleep again, fists clenched tight enough to leave nail marks in her palms.

***

“Pearl,” John Boot said.

She opened her eyes, sitting up. It was still dark, but Pearl felt like dawn was near. John Boot was on the floor—no,
in
the floor, half in a hole, just like the first time she’d met him. “Am I dreaming?” she asked.

“No, I’m really here. You felt... very angry, Pearl. It pulled me back.”

Maybe that’s where I went wrong
, she thought.
I tried to think sweet thoughts and call him that way, and he didn’t feel a thing, but when I got mad, like I was the
first
time, here he comes
. “Pulled you back from where?”

“Someplace where I was sleeping, sort of.”

Pearl knelt on the hard granite floor and extended her hand. He took it warily, as if expecting her to try and break his fingers. “I’m not mad at you, John Boot,” she said. She wondered about the hole. It would no doubt close up when she wasn’t paying attention, as modest in its way as John Boot was himself.

“Then what’s wrong?” he asked, letting her help him out of the hole. “Did your plan work, are you getting a pardon?” He sat cross-legged on the floor, naked again, except for his fine boots.

She hesitated. She planned to use John Boot, no two ways about it. Pearl seldom shrank from saying hurtful things, but she hadn’t ever hurt John Boot on purpose, and he’d done a lot for her. A little lie to spare his feelings wouldn’t do any harm now.

“That’s right, I’m getting pardoned,” she said. “The governor was very impressed with me. I’m just angry that I have to wait for the order to go through, that I’m stuck here for a few days more... and that I’m going to be alone out there, without you.”

He lowered his head. “You want me to come back?”

“I wouldn’t ask for that.” She put her hand on his bare knee. “But... I want something special to remember you by.”

“What?”

“Sleep with me, John Boot. And don’t pull out this time. I want to have your baby. We’ll do it as many times as we have to, tonight, tomorrow, as long as it takes.”

“You mean it, Pearl?” he said, taking her hand. “Really?”

“Yes.” She got on the bed. “I want your baby in the worst way.”

He came to her.

***

A little later, lying tight against him in the narrow bed, she said, “Let’s go again. We’ve got enough time before bed check.”

“We can if you want,” he said sleepily. “But we don’t have to.”

“Why?”

“Because it took.”

She pushed herself up on her elbow and looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“The baby. It took. You’re kindled.” He looked into her eyes. “I can feel it. I felt it the other time, too, when you... lost it. I wish...” He shrugged. “But it’s all right now.”

“Oh, John Boot. You’ve made me so happy.”

“I should go.”

“Wait until dawn? I want to see your face in the morning light one more time.”

He held her. When the sun came, he kissed her cheek. “I have to go.”

She nodded, then looked away, to give him his privacy.

“No,” he said, touching her cheek. “You can look, this time.”

She watched. He dissolved like the remnant of a dream, first his warmth fading, then his skin turning to smoke, until finally he disappeared all the way, leaving Pearl with nothing in her arms but emptiness, and a tiny spark of life in her belly.

***

Pearl waited two months, still behaving herself. Each time she saw the warden she made a point of anxiously asking if he’d heard from the governor. They hadn’t, and the warden’s wife clucked her tongue and said everything would work out. Pearl had no doubt about that.

After two months, Pearl asked to see a nurse. The woman examined her, and Pearl told her she’d missed two months in a row. The nurse blushed, but didn’t ask probing questions. She went to report her findings to the warden.

Pearl’s pregnancy created a difficult situation. As far as anyone knew, only one man had been alone with Pearl during her years of incarceration, and that man was the governor. He would say he hadn’t slept with Pearl, of course, but she would say otherwise, and publicity like that wouldn’t do anybody any good. She knew the governor would take the obvious way out, and avoid the scandal.

She didn’t have to wait long.

“In light of your delicate circumstances,” the warden said two days later, not meeting her eyes, “the governor has decided to grant you a pardon.”

“It’s about damn time,” Pearl said.

On the day of her release a guard gave her a ride to the nearest train station. Pearl looked at the desert where she’d had her adventures, at the harsh ground that had birthed John Boot. She laced her hands over her belly, content.

There were a lot of reporters at the train station. They’d gotten wind of her plans. Pearl had decided that life as an outlaw was all well and good, but it demanded too much sleeping rough and missing meals. She had a baby to think about, now. Originally she’d planned to get rid of the baby at the earliest opportunity, but she was having second thoughts.

Pearl had a job all lined up as a traveling lecturer. A lady outlaw with risqué stories could really pack a room, and it wouldn’t be nearly so strenuous as sharpshooting in a Wild West show. She wasn’t much good with a gun anyway.

She waved to the reporters as she boarded the train. They only knew she’d been pardoned, not why. They shouted questions, but she didn’t pay much attention. Her mind was on other things.

One question got through to her. “Pearl!” the reporter shouted. “Are you going to meet up with John Boot?”

They still thought she needed a man, after all this time. Would that ever change? “You’re a stupid bastard,” she replied mildly, and followed the porter to her compartment.

Life in Stone

After ascending seventy-two flights of iron stairs, creeping past tentacled sentinels lurking in pools filled with black water, and silently dispatching wizened old warriors armed with glaives and morningstars that proved a close match for his pistols and poisoned glass knives, Mr. Zealand at last stumbled into the uppermost room of Archibald Grace’s invisible tower. All Zealand’s earlier murders were mere journeyman work compared to this final assassination, the murder of a man who’d lived for untold centuries, who’d come to America and enslaved Buffalo spirits, who’d built this tower of ice and iron on the far side of the Rockies as a sanctuary and stronghold for his own precious life.

Zealand rested for a moment, catching his breath. He got winded so much more easily now than he had as a young man, and he didn’t sleep well anymore, which made him jangly all day, most days. He leaned against a filigreed pillar of white ivory, a tusk or bone cut from some prehistoric—possibly even ahistorical—leviathan. Archibald Grace had doubtless slain whatever monster this ivory came from. He was a killer of such stature that even Zealand found himself humbled. Grace had murdered monsters, while Zealand had seldom killed anything but men. He ran his hand along the spiraled carving on the pillar, one of a dozen in the round tower room, and then he walked to the arched, open window. He looked down from the tower’s lunatic height onto the small town of Cincaguas, just another little place in the valley, whose inhabitants were unaware of the magical edifice rising on the outskirts of town, an invisible spire so high that Zealand could look down on a slowly gliding California condor.

Having regained his breath, Zealand turned to face the center of the room. He unzipped his black canvas shoulder pack and reached inside to touch the haft of a stone-headed axe, an ancient implement fitted onto an unbreakable carbon-steel handle. Zealand approached the center of the room, passing the pillars, and saw what he’d been led to expect—a square box, two feet to a side, resting on an ivory pedestal. The box was a simple thing, made of aged wood worn so smooth that the grain was nearly invisible. Zealand drew one of his remaining knives, this one made of ceramic, and used the blade to pry open and lift the lid.

The box was empty. Zealand stared at the space inside for a long time, going so far as to probe the inner edges with his knife, looking for a false bottom, but there was no such concealment. The stone simply wasn’t there. Despite all the effort he’d spent making his way to the top of this edifice, there would be no reward. He’d learned long ago that mere effort didn’t guarantee success, but this was an especially bitter reminder of that fact.

Zealand sank to the floor, sitting cross-legged, resting his head in his hands. He was too old for this by at least a dozen years. In his younger, hungrier days, such a setback would only have infuriated and energized him, given him an adrenal surge and a slow-burning determination to soldier on, but he’d long since grown out of such dedication to his work for its own sake. For many years he’d crafted an image of himself as an implacable nightstalker, relentless avatar of death, and he’d seen his work as a sort of nightmarish inversion of a holy mission.

But he’d just turned forty-five, he suffered chronic lower back pain, he found it increasingly embarrassing to sleep with prostitutes less than half his age, and he’d spent the past dozen birthdays and New Year’s Eves alone in his home amid the redwoods above Santa Cruz, California. He’d lost all illusions about his career. He was neither avenging angel nor cinematic assassin; he was simply a man who’d spent a lot of years killing people for money. This job was more of the same, despite certain baroque complications and supernatural curlicues.

Though there was the promise of something more than money as payment if he succeeded in taking Archibald Grace’s life.

Zealand got to his feet. No use mourning the moment of failure. Better to push himself, weary or not, onward to the possibility of success. He reloaded his pistols and redistributed his knives. Now he had to make his way back down to the foot of the tower. Maybe the guards wouldn’t harry him so, if he was only trying to leave. He could hope for that much.

***

The next day Zealand met his client, the thus-far-immortal Archibald Grace himself. They shared their usual booth at their usual Italian restaurant, Grace drinking cheap house wine, Zealand sticking to water.

“Damn,” Grace said. “I thought for sure I’d left it there.” Grace looked like a young man, with a neat black beard and eyes the clear blue of synthetic sapphires.

“You were sure you’d left it in Mammoth Caves, too,” Zealand said with practiced patience. “Sure you’d left it in the Great Sequoia Forest, certain it was in your old summer palace at the bottom of Lake Champlain, and positive it was hidden behind Niagara Falls. I am beginning to suspect you need a tutorial in the proper meaning of the words ‘sure,’ ‘certain,’ and ‘positive.’”

“I am sorry,” Grace said, looking into his wine. “You can have ownership of the tower, of course, as usual.”

“Oh, good,” Zealand said. “It will go nicely with the mud-slimed cave full of ghosts behind Niagara, and the sinkhole decorated with obscene pictographs in Mammoth Caves. Though I admit the palace in Champlain is nice. If it weren’t also the den of an aquatic monster, I might even go back there. I’d like the tower better if it weren’t full of homicidal beasts and your wizened homunculi.”

“There’s a phrase, to stop them from attacking you,” Grace said, making a familiar grasping motion with his left hand. “But I’ve forgotten it. I’ve forgotten so many things.” He still stared into his wine, as if he might find his missing memories at the bottom of the glass.

Zealand, who was not a man given to casual gestures of physical affection, reached across to touch Grace’s hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll find your life, and I will crush it. You will die.”

“I’m sure it’s in North America,” Grace said. “I moved everything with me when I came here. I came with the....” He made the grasping motion again.

“The Vikings,” Zealand said, sitting back. “On the longboats. You’ve told me.”

“I brought my life, my soul, hidden in a stone. Or, perhaps, an egg.” Grace cupped his hands around a half-remembered roundness. “All the wizards and witches and giants and monsters knew the trick, to put your life somewhere safe, so your body couldn’t be killed. So long as your life is safe, you live. We used to hide our souls in tree trunks, until the witch hunters began putting whole forests to the torch. As the trees burned, the souls burned, and sorcerers screamed across the continent.” He clucked his tongue. “Then, for a time, it was fashionable to hide your life in the head of a toad, but toads are stupid, and often get eaten, or die. I was always smart. I hid my life well.”

“I know,” Zealand said.

“But I’ve forgotten where I put it.” Grace looked up from his wine, into Zealand’s face, and for a moment it was clear he’d forgotten who Zealand was. “I’ve forgotten so many things. It’s hard to know which things are worth remembering, when you don’t have a soul.”

“I know,” Zealand said again.

“I used to be a giant.” Grace looked wistful. “Before I was a man. I broke the spines of mammoths in my hands. But I’ve forgotten how to be a giant, and I don’t want to be a man. I only want to die.”

“I know,” Zealand said, for the third time. Three times was usually enough to make Grace stop going over the usual elusive reminiscences again. “Where should I look next, do you think?”

“Look for what?” Grace said, blinking his beautiful eyes.

“Come, then,” Zealand said. “I’ll take you home.”

***

Some weeks later, after another pair of fruitless searches for Grace’s life, Zealand crunched through the snow-covered sand on the shore of Lake Tahoe. The water was still and blue, and though there was no wind, the cold was bitter and penetrating, making the inside of Zealand’s nose burn with every breath. A woman stood on the edge of the water, a long black scarf hanging motionless down her back, her thick down coat the red of arterial spurt.

“Are you Hannah?” Zealand asked.

She turned, the lower half of her face covered by the scarf. “Mr. Zed?” she said, her accent British and precise. Her eyes were the color of the water, almost the color of Archibald Grace’s own, which made sense, as Hannah claimed to be Grace’s daughter. When she’d first contacted him, Zealand had been suspicious, partly because Grace’s apparent sexual preference made the presence of offspring rather unlikely, but upon further consideration it was understandable that someone as old as Grace would have tried various partners and sexual permutations, probably many times over. Hannah had known things about Grace that Grace barely remembered about himself, and Zealand was reasonably certain her claim was true.

“You told me you know the whereabouts of your father’s life,” Zealand said. He was still fascinated by her eyes, so like Grace’s.

“I do. I’ll take you there, but you have to do something for me first.”

“I’m not prepared to wait,” Zealand said. His tone was polite, but the menace was implicit.

She laughed, harsh and hyena-like, quite unlike her urbane voice. “Father has lived for epochs. Another day or two won’t matter.”

“Nevertheless, I want you to tell me now.”

She pulled the scarf down. Below the eyes, her face was inhuman, with two holes covered by membranous flaps where her nose should have been. Her mouth was lipless, filled by a score of two-inch-long interlocking incisors. She resembled nothing so much as a deep-sea fish, one of those horrors fishermen occasionally pulled up in their nets, and Zealand recalled Grace’s claim to have spent years living beneath the sea. When Hannah spoke again, her mouth did not open, and Zealand realized that her human voice was a magical contrivance, not something born of her own vocal cords at all. “My father is almost a god, and my mother was the mistress of black oceanic caves. I will decide where we go, and when.”

Zealand drew a pistol and fired a shot, blowing off Hannah’s right knee. She screamed, this time opening her mouth, and it was an inhuman, gurgling sound. She fell to the sand, throwing her head back into the snow, her monstrous teeth spreading apart, her long tongue lolling out as she shrieked. She had a bioluminescent bulb on the end of her tongue, glowing a sick yellow.

Zealand put his gun away, wondering if he’d made his point sufficiently. Hannah had stopped screaming, so perhaps not. Feeling himself cloaked in a kind of prevailing numbness, what he had long thought of as his “working state,” Zealand put one heavy boot down on Hannah’s right thigh, just above her destroyed knee, then bent over to grasp her ankle in both hands. He wrenched her leg upward, grunting and twisting, pulling on her ankle while pressing down on the thigh with his foot, until her lower leg came free with a sickening pop. Hannah lashed and flailed at him, but the pain made her imprecise. Zealand noted with interest that she didn’t bleed, though the wound seeped clear water. He hurled her lower leg into the lake, then stepped away from her thrashing limbs. “I hope you’re part starfish, or that leg might be gone forever. You’ll tell me where to find your father’s life now.”

Tears ran from Hannah’s eyes. Her screams had subsided to whimpers, and the whimpering didn’t stop when she spoke in her magical human voice—both sounds emerged simultaneously. “I only wanted to see my father again. I wanted you to take me to him. I’ve hated him for too long, hated him for his essential nature, and I wanted him to know that I forgave him, if he would forgive me.” Despite her obvious agony, her voice remained clear and barely modulated.

“Your father has something like Alzheimer’s, but more profound. He doesn’t even remember your existence.” Zealand had asked Grace if he knew anyone named Hannah, and Grace had given him that blank, desperate look and grasped at the air, but that was all. He’d been quiet and morose for hours after Zealand asked him, though, and Zealand suspected that Hannah’s name had set up unpleasant resonances deep inside Grace, below his conscious mind. “But since he doesn’t remember you, it means he doesn’t hold a grudge for whatever drove the two of you apart, if that’s any comfort.”

“His mind is gone?”

“Not entirely, but it is degrading more every day. I think it comes from having lived so long without his soul.”

“You intend to restore his soul to him?”

Zealand shook his head.

Hannah stared up at him, her monstrous jaw clenched. “Then you will kill him, destroy his life?”

“It’s what he wants. It’s why he hired me.” Zealand gestured with a gloved hand. “You’ve exhausted my patience once already. Are you trying to do so again? Direct me to your father’s life.”

“I have to show you.”

Zealand sighed. He trudged up the shore to his car and returned with his tool bag. He withdrew a pair of bolt cutters and snapped off Hannah’s teeth, one at a time. Then he flipped her over onto her stomach and bound her hands behind her with thick plastic loops that tightened with a tug. He picked her up over his shoulder and carried her, his knees creaking under the combined weight of Hannah and his tool bag; at least she didn’t thrash. He was breathing hard by the time they reached his car, an SUV rented under a false name. He put her in the passenger seat, and, after a moment’s thought, pulled the scarf back up over the lower half of her face. Looking at her broken teeth and glowing tongue made him feel uncomfortable, and a little guilty, the latter an emotion that had plagued him more and more in recent years. His “working state” was already fading, and the emotions that replaced it were not welcome.