The Six-Gun Tarot (16 page)

After the wedding things slowly changed. The little presents to Lottie stopped almost at once. The time Charlie and Ma spent alone together lessened and he started drinking around the house. He made Jim tend the property, pretty much alone, and started taking lots of “business trips” to Charleston and Wheeling. But the hitting was the worst.

The first time was when Jim said his pa was a better man than Charlie would ever be. Upton spun Jim around and drove a fist, like granite, into the boy’s face. Nearly broke his nose and left a faint scar on his cheek where the skin split. Ma was horrified—even at his worst Billy had never laid a hand on either child. A few weeks later Jim came home from doing some work on Abner Green’s barn to find Ma weeping; her lips were swollen and split, her teeth black with blood.

“I’m gonna kill that sumabitch,” Jim said, striding toward the rifle hanging near the door.

“No,
no,
James,” Ma said, rising. “He’s your pa now, and I will deal with this and you will hold your peace.”

“Why, Mama? Why the hell did you let him in here?” Jim said, feeling his eyes growing hot and wet. “We didn’t need his damn help this bad. I told you, I tried to tell you—”

“You shut your mouth!” Ma said. “How dare you. You aren’t the only one he ran away from. I was his wife before you were
ever
his son. No one was hurt more by him than me—no one! I did what I had to do to give Lottie and you some security, some chance to survive. I knew what he was; you think I’m a damn fool, James? But I would marry the Devil himself to save Lottie and to save you. If the worst I have to endure is a beating every once in a while for food and medicine and a roof and a chance for you to go back to school and for Lottie to keep going, I’ll gladly take it.”

Jim stood silent

“Your pa was the only man I will ever love, Jim,” she said softly. “But he is gone. He couldn’t … He wasn’t strong enough to—”

“Ma, please,” Jim said. His insides were cold and tight. “Pa didn’t, I know,
know
he would never leave you; he loved you, Ma.”

Her eyes were dry slate, her voice even. “Sometimes, Jim, love isn’t enough to hold.”

He didn’t grab the rifle. He didn’t say a word to Charlie, even when the beatings started up again that winter. Jim held his tongue because if Ma could take it, so could he.

In the early spring of 1869, Jim thought that his occasional sacrifice of popping Charlie when he was hurting Ma, taking the beating for her, was keeping his family safe.

It was around four in the afternoon and Jim was fixing some bar stools in the Cheat River Saloon. They also needed him to repair a door on one of the “hospitality parlors” upstairs, after a drunken puke, passing through, had smashed it down, convinced the whore in there was his long-estranged wife. She wasn’t.

A few of Charlie’s crew were the only customers in the place. It was old Rick Puckett, who was a farmhand on the Upton family farm, a fella Jim didn’t recognize and the old blue-eyed drunk everybody called the Professor. They were at one of the big green-felt tables playing faro. Jim could hear the metallic clatter of coins and the occasional papery crinkle of bills as they were tossed in wagers onto the felt. All three of the men were well past drunk, cussing and laughing alternately as their luck changed from hand to hand. The bartender, Travis, ignored them and paid attention to polishing the shot glasses.

“It’s to you,” the Professor muttered. He was acting as banker. “Gotta pay to see what I got.”

Puckett fumbled in his pockets. Jim heard him swear under his breath. “Y’all done just about tapped me out!”

“Stop bellyaching,” the stranger said. “In or out? You as broke as a sharecropper, then you need to shut the hell up and get out of the game.”

“Wait, wait! How about this for a stake?” Puckett said.

Something small but solid was laid on the table. Jim heard the thud while he wrestled with fitting a new leg to the stool. The Professor whistled and the stranger laughed.

“What in the hell is
that
?” the stranger said.

“Looks old,” the Professor said. “It Chinese?”

“Yup,” Rick said, the satisfaction thick in his voice. “Sure is, all the way from tha’ Queen of Sheba herself. I’m in?”

The Professor said something Jim couldn’t quite make out, but he thought he heard the word “jade.” He stopped his work and walked almost like he was in a dream into the saloon proper. The men, back to their game, ignored him. He edged closer, a feeling of horrible dread and eager anticipation wrestling in his guts like Saint George scrapping with a dragon. He looked down at the green table.

His father’s eye regarded him amidst the piles of money and cards.

Jim never fully remembered what happened next; there was motion and rage and sick comprehension. He was behind the bar, Travis’s Winchester in his hands. He was next to the table telling the men to give him the last piece of his father. The stranger smiled at him and said he was too young to be playing with rifles. Said he was going to take it away from him and then whup his ass.

Jim shot him dead as he rose, a derringer in his hand. He cocked the Model 1866, like Pa taught him; he smelled hot brass as the shell flipped out and thudded on the sawdust-covered floor. He told them again to give him the eye. Rick Puckett handed it to him and Jim remembered Rick was the one who bet it, who had it.

Rick, who worked for Charlie Upton.

“Git up,” Jim said to Rick. “Git your ass up or I swear I will kill you where you sit.”

He led Rick out past a horrified Travis, out the bright sunlight. They climbed into Rick’s buckboard and began moving. Jim snorted the smell of gun smoke and blood out of his nostrils. His life was over. He looked down at the jade eye in his palm and finally said good-bye to Pa.

Jim walked down Prosperity Street. It was dark. Argent Mountain was a massive squatting shadow. Far up he thought he saw a few cook fires guttering in the desert wind. Distorted shapes moved between the flames.

He needed to understand the legacy his pa had given him, that pa himself had thrust upon him by strangers from a far-off land. What happened in the graveyard—what happened with Charlie. Jim didn’t, couldn’t, understand it all, and he needed to. There were people here in Golgotha who could give him answers.

He turned left onto Bick Street and entered their universe.

The buildings were conventional clapboard affairs, but they were built much closer together. It would be hard for more than a single horse or a small pushcart to navigate theses narrow thoroughfares. Most of the buildings had shuttered windows and were two stories in height. Clotheslines and strings of wood and paper lanterns jumped in the night wind. There were the sounds of tiny silvered bells caressing each other, moved by the desert’s breath.

The place seemed crowded and vacant at the same time. There were people on the streets, not many at this hour. (“What on earth kind of people would be a’creeping around at all hours of the night when decent souls are in bed, so as to get up with the sun,” Ma’s voice reminded him.) They were black cotton shadows. They examined him with alien curiosity to match his own.

“Eve … Evening,” Jim muttered. The shadows passed giving no reply. Ahead, he saw a wide beam of buttery yellow light split the darkness. A group of Johnnymen was exiting a large building. They were laughing and talking in a low chattering language Jim had never heard before. It sounded like oiled springs, bouncing.

More Johnnymen were outside the doors, briefly illuminated, their profiles swirled in smoke and shadow in the yawing light. Jim made his way to the doorway. The two men on either side of it wore sleeveless shirts of black and green silk. Their arms were painted up the way Pa had once described a man he had seen at a carnival covered, head to toe, in skin pictures. Their eyes were those of dead fish.

“Evening, fellas,” Jim said, trying his best to sound like Mutt, full of casual contempt. “Nice night for a walk, huh?”

He stepped between them, moving to enter the building. He could hear laughter and smell strange smoke now. It was like Pa’s pipe tobacco, but it was sweeter and it clung to your nostrils, desperately. The larger of the two men extended an arm painted with golden fish and blue-green trees. It was like an iron bar and it stopped Jim cold.

“No inside,” the man said in a guttural growl.

Jim backed up. “Look, fellas, I’m not trying to be a gall nipper. I just need to talk to one of you-all’s teachers or preachers or whatever it is you people got. I need—”

“You need to get your hide home before we hang it up on a clothesline,” the smaller one said in very good English. He was smiling, but his eyes were not. “This is our side of town, white eyes. You run home to your momma.”

Jim fished the eye out of his pocket and held it up for the two men to see. “I need someone to tell me about this—what the writing on it means.”

As soon as he saw the reaction on the men’s faces Jim knew he had made a mistake. The larger one grabbed Jim’s hand in a flash and squinted to better make out the jade eye. The wind in the narrow corridor of a street picked up, it howled off the desert and dust bounced drunkenly off the walls and shutters. The chimes sang a frantic, tinkling song. The two men excitedly talked to each other in the scattergun language. The big one released Jim and the shorter one opened the door. He jabbed a finger at Jim.

“You stay right there,” he said, and then disappeared inside the building, releasing a cloud of smoke and a curtain of light.

“Stay,” the big one rumbled.

Jim clutched his father’s eye and sprinted as fast as he could. He heard the big one bellow behind and then heard him give chase. Jim ducked down ever-narrowing alleys and maze-like side streets. He had no idea where he was, but he knew if the two men had their way he would lose his father’s eye tonight and that was not about to happen.

The painted giant kept with him for many twist and turns. Jim could hear his labored breathing behind him. He dared not look back to see how close, since each new corner could hold a dead end or some other obstacle that could trip him up and give his pursuer the edge. It seemed to Jim that the streets of Johnny Town were too numerous, too byzantine, to truly exist in such a small town as Golgotha. It felt like he was moving through some alien world that only shared a few streets with the little town.

Finally he no longer heard the labored breathing behind him. He turned a corner, scrambled over a wooden fence, sprinted down an alleyway and ducked into an alcove as black as pitch. He stood still and fought to control the herd of stampeding cattle in his chest. He sipped air when his burning lungs demanded gulps. He clamped his mouth shut and tried to remain as still as a statue. One heartbeat, another.

Nothing. No pursuer, no ambush, nothing, just his heart thumping madly in his chest and the now-gentle murmur of the wind, pushing trash down the alley.

Jim sighed in relief and backed deeper into the dark alcove. His feet tripped over something and he fell backward, arms flailing. He landed with an ignoble and rather loud thud.

“Brilliant, Jim,” he muttered. Then he noticed what had knocked him down. It was a body. A white man, well dressed. He was not breathing. Jim scampered back against the wall, half-expecting his hunter to appear. But he didn’t. It was just Jim and the dead man.

“Reckon it is best to get to bed early, Ma,” he said.

The Devil

He arrived with the morning light. Of course he did.

“Hail, Biqa!” The voice was liquid beauty, poured into a silver-star chalice. His very presence carried with it all of Heaven’s warm memory. Biqa suddenly recalled, again, how cold this place was.

“Lucifer!” Biqa rose from where he had been watching the little monkeys work together to gather roots. They were collecting enough to feed the entire group, even the injured one and the old one back at the cave. They had grown in the time since they had first come to him and he was proud of how they had banded together to survive this harsh world they had been tossed into.

He embraced God’s most beloved and beautiful angel—he whom God had crafted most closely in His own image of the entire Host. Lucifer laughed and it was like the world existed to hear it.

“Have you come to bring me home?” Biqa asked.

“In a manner of speaking,” Lucifer said. “Biqa, things are not going well at home. Haven’t you wondered why God has left you here so long with no word, no relief? No company except a bunch of chattering rodents with a life span so short they literally die in the blink of an eye.”

“Primates,” Biqa said softly. “Not rodents, primates.”

The Light Bringer laughed. A hand that had set stars in the firmament waved in a dismissive gesture.

“Rodents, primates, coelacanths, leviathans, honestly, Biqa, how can you keep up with all the ridiculous minutiae of His insane experiment?”

“I’ve always noted that the elements that usually cause the most trouble are in the details, Lucifer.”

“Hmmm, that’s catchy. Remind me to write that down. God hasn’t tasked me to relieve you, my brother. I’ve taken it upon myself to come and ask for your help, to bring you back to Heaven.”

“You what?”

“I came of my own accord. Biqa, things are not well at home. God is making terrible choices. He is ordering things of the Host that are insulting, disrespectful. Many of us fear that He has gone mad.”

The dark angel stepped away from the Light Bringer.

“These things you say. Surely you know the Almighty—”

“The
Almighty,
oh please,” Lucifer spit. “I was brought into being shortly after He became aware of His own existence. He
claims
to have made me, but I have long suspected that I am His equal, forged of the Void and will, alone. He is far from almighty, Biqa, and His days of tyranny are nearing an end. He is too preoccupied with His laboratory, His Earth, and its precious little mortal bugs, to notice what any of the Host do or say.”

The plain grew silent. The hum of the insects at dawn ended abruptly. Biqa noted the change, but Lucifer seemed oblivious to it, either that or he simply didn’t care. The two angels stood bathed in the bloodred light of the dawn.