The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (34 page)

“That’s a lot of hard tongue for a man who carries a Bible,” the bounty killer said.

“Fair enough . . . but right now I’m not behind a pulpit, friend. I’m doing business, and business calls for straight tongue. So what is it? What do you want from me? Is there something down in that devil’s shithole that you want prayed to death?”

The gunslinger didn’t blink.

“It’s simple. I want words said over anything I kill tonight. The way I see it, you may not be the best man for the job, but you’re the only one around tonight.”

The preacher bit off a hard laugh. “Sometimes finding work is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. And as far as words go, no one said a single damn one over those poor bastards you slaughtered back in the saloon.”

“We’re going to fix that right now.”

“Well, we can talk about it. You killed a lot of men back there. Generally my fees for funeral services are one per customer. And since this piece of business doesn’t have anything to do with going down in a cave, it’s got to be a separate deal—”

“I already told you the deal.” The bounty killer snatched the bank book out of the preacher’s hand and grabbed him by the collar. The fuss the preacher put up did not last long, not after a couple hard slaps put the button to his lip.

We went back to the bar. Except for the dead men, it was empty. Even the whores were gone. God knows where the ladies had hustled off to, but they’d made themselves scarce after the gunfight.

The blacksmith and the bounty killer took a few doors off their hinges in the whores’ rooms upstairs. They placed the doors flat, each one resting between a couple of chairs, and they laid the dead men on top of them. They crossed the corpses’ arms over their chests—the ones who had two arms, anyway. One of the men who’d been sprayed with Rumson’s sawed-off street howitzer was missing a wing. He lay there just as still as the others, the stiffening fingers of his remaining hand embracing the ruined socket just north of his heart. Rumson’s headless corpse lay next to him; the leavings of his skull were in a canvas bag at his feet.

Once the dead were settled, the preacher said his piece. It was a short piece, and bereft of flowers. That was just fine with me. I was not much on flowers. As it turned out, the preacher was not much on words . . . especially when payday was a ways off.

When the praying was over, he sidled past the dynamite man.

A little blood trickled from the preacher’s lip, and he wiped it away.

“He’s one dirty bastard we’re working for,” he said. “But that was money in the bank.”

The blacksmith did most of the grunt work. He harnessed a team of swaybacks to a wagon while Indio and the preacher looted the general store for supplies. I tipped a dude’s beaver-skinned bowler out of a hatbox and nestled Henrietta inside it, then helped myself to a new set of clothes. It had been a while since I’d had one. I was almost seventeen, and had been wearing the set I had on for something like two years. They were tight and stiff with the sweat of misery. The preacher watched me as I stripped out of them.

“Jesus, you’re ugly. You look worse than that half-plucked chicken.”

“I don’t have to speak to you,” I said.

“Tell the truth. When we found you in that cage, you were ready to eat that chicken raw. You’re probably still going to eat it as soon as you get a chance. Why else would you pluck the damn bird, anyway?”

“I keep Henrietta’s wings plucked so she won’t get away. She’s not half-grown, even. She needs me to keep her warm. And that man with the gun is right. You don’t talk like a preacher.”

The man in black laughed. “Hell, I talk the way I please when there’s not a collection plate around. And as for pets, you want one, get a dog. You want victuals, get a chicken. That’s what god intended, son . . . unless you’re a damn heathen Apache that’ll eat both and follow the meal with a little skin jerky baked off a white boy’s face for dessert.”

I ignored him. After I had dressed, I helped myself to a wide-brimmed hat to shadow my scars. That was when I heard the others chattering over the events in Rumson’s saloon. I closed my eyes and listened, saw everything happen in my head. It was just the way I pictured things when I read a book. When the men finished the story, the blacksmith and I loaded up the supplies in the wagon.

While I worked, I added pieces of the story to the things I’d already learned about the men. And I’ll admit it. I thought about money while I did that. I thought about freedom, too. A place where I could be by myself, except for Henrietta and maybe some old tomcat. It’d be a place where I wouldn’t have to tell that story about the cave, or have anyone look at me at all if I didn’t want them to. Maybe it’d be a place where I could tell other stories, write them down and send them off to folks who would print them between hard covers. They’d send me money, and I’d write more when I wanted to. It seemed like that would be a square deal, and a lot better than the one I’d had at Rumson’s place.

I thought about it long and hard.

Pretty soon I’d made a decision.

A smart person might risk just about anything for a setup like that.

Even a return trip to hell.

Soon the wagon was loaded, and that put the end to my thoughts. It was time to move on. The preacher and Indio went off somewhere and came back with a crate of dynamite. After the murders in Rumson’s saloon, it was easy pickings in town tonight. We left the general store with the door wide open. It didn’t matter. Sheriff Needham was nowhere in sight. I didn’t know where the hard-eyed little lawdog and his deputy had got to, but whether they had made the trip out of luck or fear I figured they were smart to be clear of things this night.

We returned to the bar to get the bounty killer. He’d remained with the dead men, knowing there was no worry about any of us running off now that the numbers from his bank book were dancing in our heads. The desert night was cold, wind blowing down from the mountain. Dust devils swirled around us, erasing the footsteps of the men who lay dead in Rumson’s bar. It was like the night wanted to clear off the last trace of them. The moon was full up by then, and it hung low in the sky, and light spilled from it like an Apache buck’s knife had slit it straight across and turned all that bleeding white loose.

I sat in the wagon with the reins in my hands. Henrietta was asleep in the hatbox at my side. The other men were on horseback. We heard the bounty killer coughing inside Rumson’s place as he walked from dead man to dead man, not getting too close to any of them, staring down at each one. Between coughs, he tried to work words through his lips. The batwings creaked in the wind, swinging in and out, and the gunman seemed to be strangling on those words, and through the gap I saw him go down on his knees as quick as if someone had clubbed him with an ax-handle.

He started to retch, and we heard a thick splatter slap the floorboards.

“The bastard gunned those men down like dogs,” the preacher said. “You’d think he’d have the nerve to face them dead.”

“Nerve ain’t his problem,” Indio said. “He’s got plenty of nerve.”

I wondered about that as I watched the bounty killer there in the shadows. His guts bucked him something awful. The sound was horrible, like something alive trying to eat its way out of him. We all looked away.

I closed my eyes. The night was black, but the only color in my head was red. It painted the barroom floor and the bounty killer’s lips and the things I saw. They were things that had happened in the night, some that I’d seen and some that I hadn’t, but all of them were broiling in my thoughts nonetheless. The bloodstained harmonica on the bar. The murders in the barroom. Rumson’s head toppling off his shoulders, kicking up a sawdust cloud as it hit the floor. I saw all that like the blood on King Arthur’s sword in the tales I read, and Aladdin’s scimitar flashing through Arabian shadows, and Billy the Kid blasting a man’s guts to ribbons with a shotgun. Everything I saw played to the sound of a harmonica scrabbling over the ribs of the night, and gunshots from a black rattler of a pistol, and whispered voices in a general store at midnight. All of it was red, and it went down my spine like a bucket of ice, and it made me sit up straight on that wagon box with my breath trapped in my throat.

And that was a long time ago. The night it happened, I mean. But I knew even then that there was power in those stories, in seeing them slide up against one another like cards in a poker hand you know will win the pot. That was like having a headful of magic, and a brain that could cast a thousand-league spell, and I let it spin awhile.

I didn’t open my eyes until I heard the stiff creak of batwing doors. The bounty killer stepped out of Rumson’s saloon. His pistol was in its holster, and his harmonica was in his hand.

He coughed a few times, then spit a mouthful of blood in the dirt.

“Let’s ride,” was all he said.

Part Three: The Desert

The morning wasn’t bright. Not right off, anyway. It churned up out of the night slow and gray, like a dull reflection in an old mirror. I rode in the wagon behind the men. All I saw of them that morning was their backs and the dust raised by their horses. The gray light washed over them and the dust churned at their stirruped heels just as sure as the gray light, and when the light married up with the dirt it was like heaven and earth were stitching shrouds for the four men who’d walked out of Rumson’s saloon alive the night before.

That was not an image born of fancy. I stared hard and saw straight through the men to things that lay ahead of them. Doing that was like reading a book, and seeing a scene bloom in my head before I so much as turned the page and sent my eyes across the black lines that told the same tale I’d imagined.

Some folks say that’s a kind of witchcraft. They call it
second sight.
I say it’s just paying attention. That’s why I understood about Rumson and the rest of them in that town before they showed their true colors. I watched them and paid attention. In my mind’s eye, I saw them do the things they’d do before they so much as thought about doing them. I understood which way they’d jump when push came to shove. I knew it the way I knew what Rumson did with his whores when the bar was closed and I was locked up tight in my cage, the same way I knew what he’d do if anyone ever challenged him the way the bounty killer did.

And I saw these men the same way. Bits of the night came back to me, that reverie in red glimpsed just hours before. Words blew at me through the wind, and the fisted nubs of my scorched ears caught them. They built the story that waited ahead of us. It sang in my head the way my memories sang, and with it came the crackle of fires that had warmed me and maimed me, and the red glow of the fire we’d build in the night that waited ahead. And in that night were other deeds and stories, some I saw clear and some I only felt like an October wind that promises the stark cold of November.

But everywhere I looked, the men were there. The preacher, with his ledger book Bible. The blacksmith, a man who found it easier to do what others told him than the things he might want to do for himself. And Indio, the dynamite man, whose mind was set on a life without shackles.

Those three were easy to know. But some men aren’t so easy. You can’t tell what they’ll do until they do it. That’s the way it was with the bounty killer. Men like that come straight at you, but you can’t shear them of surprises. They have faces that show you nothing, and hearts that hold secrets maybe even they don’t understand.

Of course, it took me a lifetime to learn that. I had good teachers. I learned the lesson from dead men with hearts built from shadows, who came out of a grave-hole in the desert and took me down to hell. I learned it from Apaches who tied me to a wagon wheel and roasted my face while their faces wore no expressions at all. I learned that lesson, and I learned it as well as the story I told in Rumson’s saloon. Red or white, living or dead, sooner or later most men show you what they have inside . . . even if you can’t see it coming.

I figured that’s the way it would be with the bounty killer.

I figured it was only a matter of time.

Towards dusk, we camped in the middle of nothing. Just a playa of cracked earth that powdered an inch deep with every step so that it was like walking on pie crust. The preacher wrung the necks of a couple of hens he’d stolen from a coop behind the general store, and Indio cleaned them and set those birds on a spit over the fire. The blacksmith rigged a little crank on the end of the spit, turning it with a hand which had long ago befriended the lick of flame. The wind came at us and churned the white earth as I told my story, and the campfire kicked up spark and cinder that snapped at those dead birds like a hungry dog.

“We were part of a wagon train,” I said, holding Henrietta close. “My family and me. One night we camped in a place like this. Big open space. White everywhere, too much white for the night to blanket. Just a little sliver of a moon above, but it lit up the whole place just as sure as that full moon is doing tonight. And I don’t know—maybe this was the very same place where we camped. It could be, I guess. It seems just like it.”

“Ain’t that always the way it is.” The preacher snorted a laugh. “Watch out, boys—there might be a booger-man behind you.”

“Button it,” the bounty killer said.

I went on with the story. “They came for us in the night. They didn’t look like men. Looked more like shadows. Just patches of black moving with the wind, sliding over that desert with faces as white as smoke. They rose up out of a hole in the ground no bigger than a dug grave and did their business. Snatched blankets off folks so quick it was like they were tearing up the night, and they tossed those blankets to the wind and ripped folks open with clawed hands. Did it so fast it was like they’d popped the stitches on a goatskin canteen and spilled a fiesta’s worth of Mexican wine.

“They gathered around drinking their fill before the earth soaked it up. There must have been fifty of those things, and they killed most everyone before we even knew what was happening. I woke up in a puddle of my older sister’s blood with a leather strap tied around my ankles. I guess by then those bloodsuckers had chugged down their fill of blood, same way cowhands get their fill of whiskey when they’re on a spree. But they weren’t so full that they didn’t want to rustle a bottle from behind the bar to see them through the next day and the night beyond.