The Very Best of F & SF v1 (39 page)

The fire burned
down rapidly and the barflies came back in. She began to dose herself with the
Star Whiskey, and by midnight she was blackly drunk.

VIII

She ceased her
narrative, and when he made no immediate comment, she thought at first that the
story had put him to sleep. She had begun to drowse herself when he asked: “That’s
all?”

“Yes. That’s
all. It’s very late.”

“Um.” He was
rolling another cigarette.

“Don’t get
crumbs in my bed,” she told him, more sharply than she had intended.

“No.”

Silence again,
as if all possible words between them had been exhausted. The tip of his
cigarette winked off and on.

“You’ll be
leaving in the morning,” she said dully.

“I should. I
think he’s left a trap for me here. A snare.”

“Don’t go,” she
said.

“We’ll see.”

He turned on his
side away from her, but she was comforted. He would stay. She drowsed.

On the edge of
sleep she thought again about the way Nort had addressed him, in that strange
talk. She had not seen him express emotion before or since. Even his lovemaking
had been a silent thing, and only at the last had his breathing roughened and
then stopped for a minute. He was like something out of a fairytale or a myth,
the last of his breed in a world that was writing the last page of its book. It
didn’t matter. He would stay for a while. Tomorrow was time enough to think, or
the day after that. She slept.

IX

In the morning
she cooked him grits which he ate without comment. He shoveled them into his
mouth without thinking about her, hardly seeing her. He knew he should go.
Every minute he sat here the man in black was further away— probably into the
desert by now. His path had been undeviatingly south.

“Do you have a
map?” he asked suddenly, looking up.

“Of the town?”
She laughed. “There isn’t enough of it to need a map.”

“No. Of what’s
south of here.”

Her smile faded.
“The desert. Just the desert. I thought you’d stay for a little.”

“What’s south of
the desert?”

“How would I
know? Nobody crosses it. Nobody’s tried since I was here.” She wiped her hands
on her apron, got potholders, and dumped the tub of water she had been heating
into the sink, where it splashed and steamed.

He got up.

“Where are you
going?” She heard the shrill fear in her voice and hated it.

“To the stable.
If anyone knows, the hostler will.” He put his hands on her shoulders. The
hands were warm. “And to arrange for my mule. If I’m going to be here, he
should be taken care of. For when I leave.”

But
not yet.
She looked up at him. “But you watch
that Kennerly. If he doesn’t know a thing, he’ll make it up.”

When he left she
turned to the sink, feeling the hot, warm drift of her grateful tears.

X

Kennerly was
toothless, unpleasant, and plagued with daughters. Two half-grown ones peeked
at the gunslinger from the dusty shadows of the barn. A baby drooled happily in
the dirt. A full-grown one, blonde, dirty, sensual, watched with a speculative
curiosity as she drew water from the groaning pump beside the building.

The hostler met
him halfway between the door to his establishment and the street. His manner
vacillated between hostility and a craven sort of fawning— like a stud mongrel
that has been kicked too often.

“It’s bein’
cared for,” he said, and before the gunslinger could reply, Kennerly turned on
his daughter: “You get in, Soobie! You get right the hell in!”

Soobie began to
drag her bucket sullenly toward the shack appended to the barn.

“You meant my
mule,” the gunslinger said.

“Yes, sir. Ain’t
seen a mule in quite a time. Time was they used to grow up wild for want of ’em,
but the world has moved on. Ain’t seen nothin’ but a few oxen and the coach
horses and... Soobie, I’ll whale you, ’fore God!”

“I don’t bite,” the
gunslinger said pleasantly.

Kennerly cringed
a little. “It ain’t you. No, sir, it ain’t
you.
“He grinned loosely. “She’s just naturally gawky. She’s got a
devil. She’s wild.” His eyes darkened. “It’s coming to Last Times, mister. You
know how it says in the Book. Children won’t obey their parents, and a plague’ll
be visited on the multitudes.”

The gunslinger
nodded, then pointed south. “What’s out there?”

Kennerly grinned
again, showing gums and a few sociable yellow teeth. “Dwellers. Weed. Desert.
What else?” He cackled, and his eyes measured the gunslinger coldly.

“How big is the
desert?”

“Big.” His grin
was serious, Kennerly endeavored to look serious. But the layers of secret
humor and fear and ingratiation vied beneath the skin in a moiling confusion.

“Maybe three
hundred miles. Maybe a thousand. I can’t tell you, mister. There’s nothing out
there but devil-grass and maybe demons. That’s the way the other fella went.
The one who fixed up Norty when he was sick.”

“Sick? I heard
he was dead?”

Kennerly kept
grinning. “Well, well. Maybe. But we’re growed-up men, ain’t we?”

“But you believe
in demons.”

Kennerly looked
affronted. “That’s a lot different.”

The gunslinger
took off his hat and wiped his forehead. The sun was hot, beating steadily. Kennerly
seemed not to notice. In the thin shadow by the livery, the baby girl was
gravely smearing dirt on her face. “You don’t know what’s after the desert?”

Kennerly
shrugged. “Some might. The coach ran through part of it fifty years ago. My pap
said so. He used to say ’twas mountains. Others say an ocean... a green ocean
with monsters. And some say that’s where the world ends. That there ain’t
nothing but lights that’ll drive a man blind and the face of God with his mouth
open to eat them up.”

“Drivel,” the
gunslinger said shortly.

“Sure it is.” Kennerly
cringed again, hating, fearing, wanting to please. “You see my mule is looked
after.” He flicked Kennerly another coin, which Kennerly caught on the fly. “Surely.
You stayin’ a little?”

“I guess I might.”

“That Allies
pretty nice when she wants to be, ain’t she?”

“Did you say
something?” the gunslinger asked remotely. Sudden terror dawned in Kennerly’s
eyes, like twin moons coming over the horizon. “No, sir, not a word. And I’m
sorry if I did.” He caught sight of Soobie leaning out a window and whirled on
her. “I’ll whale you now, you little slut-face! ’Fore God! I’ll—”

The gunslinger
walked away, aware that Kennerly had turned to watch him, aware of the fact
that he could whirl and catch the hostler with some true and untinctured
emotion distilled on his face. He let it slip. It was hot. The only sure thing
about the desert was its size. And it wasn’t all played out in this town. Not
yet.

XI

They were in bed
when Sheb kicked the door open and came in with the knife.

It had been four
days, and they had gone by in a blinking haze. He ate. He slept. He made sex
with Allie. He found that she played the fiddle and he made her play it for
him. She sat by the window in the milky light of daybreak, only a profile, and
played something haltingly that might have been good if she had been trained.
He felt a growing (but strangely absent-minded) affection for her and thought
this might be the trap the man in black had left behind. He read dry and
tattered back issues of magazines with faded pictures. He thought very little
about everything.

He didn’t hear
the little piano player come up—his reflexes had sunk. That didn’t seem to
matter either, although it would have frightened him badly in another time and
place.

Allie was naked,
the sheet below her breasts, and they were preparing to make love.

“Please,” she
was saying. “Like before, I want that, I want—”

The door crashed
open and the piano player made his ridiculous, knock-kneed run for the sun.
Allie did not scream, although Sheb held an eight-inch carving knife in his
hand. Sheb was making a noise, an inarticulate blabbering. He sounded like a
man being drowned in a bucket of mud. Spittle flew. He brought the knife down
with both hands, and the gunslinger caught his wrists and turned them. The
knife went flying. Sheb made a high screeching noise, like a rusty screen door.
His hands made fluttering marionette movements, both wrists broken. The wind
gritted against the window. Allies glass on the wall, faintly clouded and
distorted, reflected the room.

“She was mine!”
He wept. “She was mine first! Mine!”

Allie looked at
him and got out of bed. She put on a wrapper, and the gunslinger felt a moment
of empathy for a man who must be seeing himself coming out on the far end of
what he once had. He was just a little man, and gelded.

“It was for you,”
Sheb sobbed. “It was only for you, Allie. It was you first and it was all for
you. I—ah, oh God, dear God—” The words dissolved into a paroxysm of
unintelligibilities, finally to tears. He rocked back and forth, holding his
broken wrists to his belly.

“Shhh. Shhh. Let
me see.” She knelt beside him. “Broken. Sheb, you donkey. Didn’t you know you
were never strong?” She helped him to his feet. He tried to hold his hands to
his face, but they would not obey, and he wept nakedly. “Come on over to the
table and let me see what I can do.”

She led him to
the table and set his wrists with slats of kindling from the fire box. He wept
weakly and without volition, and left without looking back.

She came back to
the bed. “Where were we?”

“No,” he said.

She said
patiently, “You knew about that. There’s nothing to be done. What else is there?”
She touched his shoulder. “Except I’m glad that you are so strong.”

“Not now,” he
said thickly.

“I can make you
strong—”

“No,” he said. “You
can’t do that.”

XII

The next night
the bar was closed. It was whatever passed for the Sabbath in Tull. The gunslinger
went to the tiny, leaning church by the graveyard while Allie washed tables
with strong disinfectant and rinsed kerosene lamp chimneys in soapy water.

An odd purple
dusk had fallen, and the church, lit from the inside, looked almost like a
blast furnace from the road.

“I don’t go,” Allie
had said shortly. “The woman who preaches has poison religion. Let the
respectable ones go.”

He stood in the
vestibule, hidden in a shadow, looking in. The pews were gone and the
congregation stood (he saw Kennerly and his brood; Castner, owner of the town’s
scrawny dry-goods emporium, and his slat-sided wife; a few barflies; a few “town”
women he had never seen before; and, surprisingly, Sheb). They were singing a
hymn raggedly,
a cappella.
He looked curiously at the mountainous woman at the pulpit. Allie
had said: “She lives alone, hardly ever sees anybody. Only comes out on Sunday
to serve up the hellfire. Her name is Sylvia Pittston. She’s crazy, but she’s
got the hoodoo on them. They like it that way. It suits them.”

No description
could take the measure of the woman. Breasts like earthworks. A huge pillar of
a neck overtopped by a pasty white moon of a face, in which blinked eyes so
large and so dark that they seemed to be bottomless tarns. Her hair was a beautiful
rich brown and it was piled atop her head in a haphazard, lunatic sprawl, held
by a hairpin big enough to be a meat skewer. She wore a dress that seemed to be
made of burlap. The arms that held the hymnal were slabs. Her skin was creamy,
unmarked, lovely. He thought that she must top three hundred pounds. He felt a
sudden red lust for her that made him feet shaky, and he turned his head and
looked away.

“Shall we gather
at the river,

The beautiful,
the beautiful,

The riiiiver,

Shall we gather
at the river,

That flows by
the Kingdom of God.”

The last note of
the last chorus faded off, and there was a moment of shuffling and coughing.

She waited. When
they were settled, she spread her hands over them, as if in benediction. It was
an evocative gesture.

“My dear little
brothers and sisters in Christ.”

It was a
haunting line. For a moment the gunslinger felt mixed feelings of nostalgia and
fear, stitched in with an eerie feeling of
déjà
vu
—he thought: I dreamed this. When? He shook it
off. The audience—perhaps twenty-five all told—had become dead silent.

“The subject of
our meditation tonight is The Interloper.” Her voice was sweet, melodious, the
speaking voice of a well-trained soprano.