Cowboy Necromancer: Infinite Dusk

by Harmon Cooper

  He examined the rest of the document and didn’t find anything aside from their address, and a logo that said the insurance company was out of Albuquerque. But at least he had a name, at least his ID had been correct. This was where he used to live. Sterling sent the insurance card to his inventory list, the wallet and his flashlight alongside it. He made his way back to the shed, keeping to the shadows.

  “It’s me,” he announced before stepping into the shed. He found Don Gasper still lying on his back, half-asleep.

  “Sterling?” the old man asked, stirring a little as he turned to glance toward the doorway.

  “Yup.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I know how to find the Sunflower Kid,” Don Gasper said after a long yawn.

  “How’s that?” Sterling asked as he started to take off his boots.

  “A Juan Circle. That’s what we’ll do.”

  “A what?”

  Don Gasper waved his question away. “Mañana. Buenas noches.”

  Sterling summoned the bottle of tequila that he kept in his inventory list. With a deep sigh, he uncorked the bottle and took a swig from it. He sat, kicked off his boots, and removed his duster. He then proceeded to take off his bulletproof vest. Once he was in his undershirt, he took another melancholy pull from the bottle.

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Been a day,” Sterling told Gasper.

  “Heh… Just wait until you see what happens tomorrow.”

  .Chapter Ten.

  It was sometime the next day when the roar of ATV engines woke Sterling. He went for his revolver, only to be told to relax by Don Gasper.

  “We’re good,” the old shaman told him, strands of hair sticking out of the sides of his head at random. “They’re maybe a mile away, somewhere between here and there. They won’t find us here.” He nodded to the door, where several small black stones had been placed. “I put out a ward.”

  “Gee, thanks, Gasper. Morning to you, too.” Sterling rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. He felt like he’d been hit by a sack of adobe bricks, and for a moment, the backyard shed they were sleeping in wavered, Sterling not able to focus.

  “It’s that tequila,” Don Gasper told him.

  “Maybe I took a bigger shot than I thought,” Sterling said as he finally sat up, his back against the wall. He found his hat, and after taking a quick look inside it to make sure a scorpion hadn’t crawled in, he placed it on his head. From there, he began rolling a cigarette, some of the loose tobacco falling on the ground.

  “You want some beans?” Don Gasper asked. “Not old beans either, recently canned. I got some. Good beans.”

  “Maybe later,” Sterling told him. He lit his cigarette and took a drag off it. “So apparently, my wife’s name is Isabella.” Sterling looked down at the wooden floor, the grain of the wood blurring into focus. “Isabella.”

  “So you found something, eh? That’s a pretty name… Means ‘God’s promise.’”

  “Just found an insurance card, that’s all. Both of our names were on it.”

  “It’s a start, no?”

  “That it is. Hey, you said something about Juan last night,” Sterling said as he looked over to Don Gasper. “Care to elaborate?”

  “Sí. It’s simple: I need you to find someone named Juan.”

  “Juan, huh? A particular Juan or just any old Juan?”

  Don Gasper patted down the sides of his stringy white hair. “Any old Juan. It’s for a ritual called a Juan Circle.”

  Sterling took another long pull off the cigarette and shook his head. “What kind of wild goose chase are you about to send me on?”

  “Heh. The geese have already left,” said the shaman as he looked up at the ceiling of the shed, a small hole in the corner revealing a bright day outside, a pillar of light entering the space. “Heard some this morning.”

  “From the north, right?”

  “You know better than I,” Don Gasper told him.

  Sterling had seen the migratory geese several times now at the former state park near his pepper farm. Elephant Butte State Park had a reservoir about five miles away from T or C. It was peaceful there, the former state park named for a volcanic core formation on an island in the middle of the man-made reservoir. Sterling had sat near the lake more times than he could count, watching the sun come up, casting an array of Easter colors across the velvet smooth waves.

  There would be huge flocks of geese in V-shaped patterns in the sky come September and October, a good many of them making their way down to bathe in the water or catch a fish. There was good fishing there too, something Sterling liked to do from time to time with Kip. Considering the sere landscape of thirsty hills and scattered mesas surrounding Truth or Consequences, the reservoir was practically an oasis.

  “I’ll find you your Juan,” he told Gasper with a grunt.

  “Good, because we’re going to need him. Tonight, we figure out where the Sunflower Kid is. We can try to get a little deeper if we need to, look for Zephyr, but I can’t guarantee that’ll be a possibility. Probably should just focus on one of them.”

  When he wasn’t high or hallucinating off peyote buttons, Don Gasper carried himself in an almost frightening way, his blue-brown eyes piercing as ever, an aura about him that certainly showcased his unique character. While Sterling was sleeping, the shaman had cleaned up, washing the dried blood off his body. He was just finishing with his hair once the cowboy necromancer awoke. His wounds from yesterday’s festival were now healed, his skin darkened by the sun and covered in scars, his flesh offset by the whiteness of his beard. He was shirtless, in a pair of loose cotton shorts that tied off at the knees with a few charms around his ankles. He looked almost decent.

  “So where to now?” Sterling asked after he removed his shirt and put his bulletproof vest on. He then started on his boots. “I’ll follow your lead.”

  “We need to go to this peyotera’s home. It’s not so far from here. Toward San Ysidro, this side of the Rio Grande River.”

  “And there’s a trading post, tavern, restaurant—some place for me to collect a Juan at—in that direction, right?”

  “Sí, you should know by now that there’s always a place for someone to catch a drink. Siempre hay un changarro cerca. Always a store, no?”

  “In that case…” Sterling got to his feet and shook his arms out. “Ain’t no time like the present.”

  “Sí, vamanos.”

  As he said he would, Sterling let Don Gasper lead the way, knowing that the older man knew Las Cruces like the back of his veiny old hand. Rather than go through the neighborhood, they went the long way and kept to a broken fence line, heading toward I-25 before looping back toward the Rio Grande River, the pair making a wide circle around the elementary school where the Killbillies had set up shop.

  “Are you going to tell me the details of this Juan Circle?” Sterling asked as they walked.

  “It’s a surprise,” Don Gasper said, his cheeks lifting, a grin forming.

  “I don’t like the sound of that one bit.”

  “You’ll love it. I’ve been thinking, you know.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “Heh. I think maybe I’ll meet you in Alamogordo.”

  “You still want to deal with those enchanters, don’t you?”

  “Maleficiadores,” Gasper said with a grunt. “These powers that we have.” The shaman stopped and turned to Sterling, growing serious. “They’re not to be used the way that they are using them.”

  “So they are Adapted? Are they mancers?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Other kinds of powers, you know. Magic. Well, maybe Magdalena is a mancer. No telling. But no, we’re talking magic here. You know, magic stopped existing before the Reset, but after, when there was no one to be skeptical of it, magic magically became real again. Funny how that works, no?”

  “It’s funny, alright.”

  “Sí, muy divertido.”

  Sterling no
dded, even if he was a bit skeptical. He may not have believed in some of the things that Don Gasper did, but he believed in the old shaman enough to risk his neck coming all the way down to Las Cruces, hoping that Gasper would have a lead for him.

  “I can sense it, you know,” the elderly man said as he peered up at Sterling, who was a full head taller than Don Gasper. “Maybe sometimes, you don’t believe me, no?”

  “We’ve had this conversation so many damn times I’m not quite certain I believe myself. I came here for you, didn’t I? That should tell you something, Gasper. Let’s keep moving.”

  The shaman laughed. “You always had a way with words, vaquero nigromante.”

  “You should hear some of my desert haiku. For the record, I ain’t no cowboy. I was a pepper farmer, now just a man on a quest for vengeance who needs to find some old friends before I can roll up my sleeves and start taking on Godwalkers.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Maybe you can read me one or two of your desert haiku later, when I’m preparing. Never fancied you a poet, un poeta talentoso.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but I try…” Sterling didn’t normally share his desert haiku with anyone, and now he was going to have to figure out the best ones to read to Don Gasper. “Hey, this peyotera you know,” he said, circling back to something that the shaman had mentioned earlier, “is she going to join us tonight?”

  “No, she’s in Silver City making a transaction, of sorts. Maybe she’ll stay there for the next few weeks while the Killbillies and militia battle it out here. I don’t know. I hope she doesn’t come back. But she has buttons for me back at her trailer, told me herself, wonderful peyote buttons,” he said, smacking his lips. “Dried out and ready to go. Just need to get them.”

  Sterling nodded. He had never taken peyote before, but he knew that people referred to the way the dried cactus looked as buttons. They really weren’t his thing, hallucinatory drugs, and he certainly wasn’t going to be partaking tonight. He had to keep reminding himself that while it was crazy that he’d come to Las Cruces for Don Gasper’s advice, the man hobbling next to him had given Sterling quite a vision three years ago, and that vision had turned out to be true.

  Don Gasper may be unorthodox, but the old shaman had some real power.

  The two passed through an old mobile home park, a sign that read Holly Gardens catching Sterling’s eye. The homes weren’t very far apart, and only half of them stood, the others looted through and through, burnt out, stripped of their valuable parts. Seeing things like this no longer bothered Sterling; it was par for the course in a post-apocalyptic world, humans and varmints taking whatever it was they could find, mother nature finishing the job.

  Since they experienced frequent droughts, mother nature used the power of erosion and constant sunlight to do the dirty work of breaking down what was left of society. Sometimes plants could grow into cracks, and there were cacti that were able to flourish, but most of the damage that plagued what was once the state of New Mexico came from the heat, the wind, the relentless sun, or some combination of the three. The only thing she seemed to have a hard time with were polymers.

  A child’s toy caught Sterling’s eye in the mess of rubble, a yellow dump truck with its wheels missing. He could almost see a kid pushing the thing on the ground, placing things in the back. This made him wonder about the picture in his wallet, of his own son. What was his son’s name?

  “Stop,” Don Gasper said, the shaman’s arms tensing.

  “What?”

  “Gato.”

  Sure enough, there was a gray cat seated on the roof of one of the mobile homes, its yellow eyes locked onto them.

  “This is no good,” Don Gasper said with an exaggerated sigh. “Shoot the cat.”

  “I ain’t trying to shoot no cat, Gasper. I need to preserve my bullets.”

  Don Gasper quickly searched around for something to throw at the feline. He found a stone about the size of a small fist and chucked it. The cat bolted before the rock could hit it.

  “Those enchanters. They’re always watching me. They know, they know,” Gasper said, working himself up into a frenzy. “They know.” He started pacing, chanting something under his breath as he ran his hand through his beard. He then took off one of the prayer beads wrapped around his left wrist and spun his finger through it, muttering something in a language Sterling had never heard before.

  “Relax, Gasper. If they come here, I’ll kill them all dead; don’t you worry about that. That was just a cat.”

  “An animal is never just an animal if it’s watching you and blocking your path,” Don Gasper said as he tapped the side of his head with his finger. “Remember that.”

  “I’ll… keep that in mind. Let’s just move on.”

  The two came to another trailer park, this one seated on the top of a small hill, Sterling able to now see the Rio Grande River, the start of a mountain chain beyond that, which he knew eventually hooked up to the Robledo Mountains. Sterling read once that the range was named for Pedro Robledo, a casualty of an early Spanish expedition led by a Conquistador named Juan de Oñate y Salazar. This particular fact stuck with him for some reason, mostly because it reminded him just how long ago the region had been settled, Sterling somehow connected to these men who came over from Europe to spread their religion, and ended up pillaging and colonizing as a side quest. All the history that came after that existed in the blood that flowed through his veins, and through long forgotten tributaries of the Rio Grande.

  “We’re here,” Gasper said, as he paused in front of a rusted trailer. “We are safe, for now.”

  The peyotera lived in a two-bedroom mobile home, the door locked up tight. Don Gasper produced a key from his inventory list and motioned for Sterling to step inside. Once he had the door open, he let Sterling go in first. It was stuffy inside the trailer home, the smell of animal fat thick in the air. Dozens of dream catchers hung from the ceiling, and there were taxidermied critters on just about every surface.

  “She’s a little out there,” Don Gasper told him as he moved to the kitchen.

  “A little?”

  The shaman opened a drawer and found the dried peyote buttons, which looked almost like sliced jalapeños. There were dozens, the old shaman licking his lips as he examined each of them.

  “I reckon I’ll find us a Juan then,” Sterling said as he turned back to the door.

  “I’ll be here.”

  Before he exited the trailer, Sterling glanced back at Don Gasper. “Which way should I head, left or right?”

  “Right,” Gasper said, now completely focused on the peyote. “There’s a place not far, an old tavern of sorts, attached to a trading post. Head that way and you won’t miss it. And be careful. Don’t bring back any unwanted guests.”

  “This might take me awhile.”

  Don Gasper shrugged. “We need him this evening; as long as you can show up here by then with a man named Juan, we’re good.”

  “And food? You want me to grab you something?”

  “No, I’m fasting from here on out. I need to for the ritual,” Gasper said, not looking away from the drawer full of peyote buttons.

  “Got it.”

  Sterling stepped outside the peyotera’s trailer and stood in the sun for a moment. After rolling a cigarette, he headed in the direction that Don Gasper had suggested, making the assumption that folks actually lived in a few of the other homes in the park. Some were clearly abandoned, but a handful had signs of life, like traps out, windows open to let in a cool breeze, even the smell of sizzling meat as he neared the exit of the trailer park.

  Sterling knew he was being watched, but not by a cat. Anyone that lived in a place like this kept an eye on strangers, and a man showing up in all black alongside a bearded shirtless beatnik was certainly suspect. He kept on walking, doing his best to look like he was minding his own business, just enjoying a cigarette.

  Some activity up ahead caught his attention, Sterling squinting as he looked down the
dusty road. He saw a man getting off a horse near a small cluster of buildings. As casually as ever, mostly so he didn’t look like he was stalking the man, Sterling made his way over to the buildings to discover a trading post, a restaurant and a tavern, just as Gasper had said.

  He entered the tavern and suddenly felt hungry once the scent of frying tortillas reached him. The place was a little rough around the edges, but it seemed clean enough, and the goateed bartender looked just about as friendly as anyone else Sterling had seen at a tavern. Sterling took a seat in front of him, a pair of men in the corner sharing a bottle of tequila the only other patrons in sight.

  “What’ll it be?” the bartender asked, giving Sterling an eye that told him that he knew the cowboy necromancer wasn’t from around here.

  “Food and tequila, beer if you got it.”

  “We got it, bottled just a few days ago. Tequila too.”

  “And the food?”

  “From the restaurant next door; they’ll run it over.”

  “In that case, green chili stew and some of them fresh tortillas,” Sterling said. “I can smell them.”

  “Comes with chips and salsa too. Red, green, or Christmas?”

  “Where do you get your peppers from?”

  “Do I look like a chef to you?” the goateed bartender asked. He wore a polished sandstone bolo tie, likely a charm, over a brown button-up that was tucked into his wranglers. “Kidding, we get them from Hatch, where everyone in their right mind gets their peppers.”

  “Let’s make it Christmas.”

  “Beer, a shot of tequila, green chili stew, tortillas, chips and salsa, Christmas. Pay upfront.”

  “I got peppers, turquoise, and silver. Take your pick.”

  “I see you got a gun there too,” the bartender said, raising an eyebrow at his revolver.

  “Ain’t for sale, don’t even work anyway,” Sterling lied as he retrieved his bag of silver and turquoise. He glanced up at the man. “Did you want peppers? I got Big Jims, Jalmundos, and seeds—NuMex Española Improved, Chimayó, Big Jims, and NuMex Barker’s Hot Peppers. Take your pick.”