His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  I threw Sloman to the dirt. I stepped away.

  The moment I did, the knife caught up with time, too.

  It flew across the town square and sunk with a shaking thud into the door of the town hall.

  I waited a painful long time for them all to disperse, giving each one of them a chance to meet my gaze as if to tell them I knew, I knew, and dare them to puff themselves up. Silence followed them. The crowd slinked back to their shadows, to their homes, to their beds.

  Cicero spit. It was pink. It hit the moaning Sloman on the lapel.

  “Jesus,” he said. But that was all.

  The truth of it lay stretched out like a book in front of all of us: Grady Cicero and Peggy Winters both wondered in relative silence why one odd minute had crashed like an axe-edge against another, why there was once a golden woman, and then no longer one...

  I surveyed the alleys, the awnings, the rooftops. No shadowed figures.

  No Magnate.

  We all stood there and packed secrets away in our pockets like precious jewels. It felt nice to say nothing at all.

  24

  Cicero and I had to hoist Emp between us. Peggy Winters managed Edgar Sloman on her own. She threw him across her shoulder like a sack of feed. “Bet’cher ass you go t’ chapel inna few days, all them folk be there prayin’ up sompin’ powerful, they will, God is good’n all that.”

  Sure as hell if she wasn’t right.

  Next Sunday morning, by half-past eight, Father Steward stood at the pulpit and waved his hands and went about his Hell’s got endless room for sinners! and Temptation is the Devil’s ruse! and on and on until you wanted to burst into flames just to end it. When the whole church sang a dead-sounding hymn, I worked through pews toward a familiar wide-brimmed hat. “Miss Fulton.”

  “Oh, Elias,” she said between bits of melody. “You’re a church-man now?”

  “No bad time to start,” I said.

  “You’re interrupting the song.”

  “Best for all of us. I’m hell with a tune.”

  She had a small drink from a flask drawn from her purse.

  I rested my hand over hers where it clutched the pew in front of her. Her knuckles shook with a hellish tremble. Her voice dropped, bitter as coffee. “What the hell you want from me, Mister Faust, that you need to bother me at prayer?”

  From my pocket I removed my tiny ball bearing, polished and silver. I asked her if it looked familiar and her eyes instantly welled up with leaden tears. Her skirt hem crumpled closer to the floor. She sat. So did I. “I don’t remember where he got it. I just remember he had it. It concerned me mightily, but Paul said a boy’s apt to find baubles and things.”

  “Did he ever mention where he found it?”

  “Some man he met. Said to him – my God, what did that boy say he said? – it’d show him real family, or something of the sort. Can you believe it,” she whispered.

  “Happen to know what this fellow looked like?”

  “Goddamnit, Elias, I never saw him. I don’t remember,” she said, raising her voice to a bark. “You expect me to remember and I can’t, I just can’t, so you ought to be just fine with that. Who are you, bothering me in a house of God about my boy?”

  I tapped my hat to her and began to slink away.

  “I hate you,” Eliza Fulton said to me underneath the din of the song, words spoken so hard that a bubble of spit gleamed on her lip. A gaggle of women surrounded her in a protective shell. I listened loudly to Father Steward guide them into another proclamation of brimstone and hellfire. His gaze never met mine. He avoided it, rolling his attention to this person and that person, but never to me.

  Without a handkerchief covering his mouth, I suppose he thought himself invisible.

  Watching Morgan Kallum eat was an exercise in resilience. We’d agreed to meet at the Crooked Cocoon Saloon under the pretense of business. We sat beside a window. Emp, whose face looked like a battered side of steak, sat there too.

  “You got some big balls to want to talk to me face-to-face, Faust.”

  “Runs in the family, I guess. Good breakfast?”

  “Tastes like shit.”

  “Good to see you, Emp,” I said to the Mexican.

  Kallum glared mineshafts into me. I don’t know what the bastard relished more, my absolutely charming company, or the sloppy meal he could stuff down his gullet. “You want to explain to me why there ain’t a woman hanging from the steeple? Rumors are burning this town alive about you, Faust. About how much trouble you’re liable to cause from here on out.”

  “Laws don’t count for anything when a town stomps all over them.”

  “Laws don’t count for anything when you stick your nose into a situation it doesn’t belong in, Faust,” he said, a bead of milk dripping off his lip. “There’s a fucking murderer prancing around in those plains. I’ve got a district judge and a snot-nosed prosecutor hounding my ass to correct my marshalling inadequacies. You expect me to be calm?”

  I wiped my hand across my forehead. “I expect you not to spit milk on me when you lecture.”

  “I tried to keep you separate from it,” he said. “For your own damn good.”

  His supposed charity made my guts go to ice. So I told him what happened. The lynchmob, Emp getting overpowered. A slip of the noose. A moment of distraction.

  I’m pretty good at bullshit. About as good at it as I am at banking and dress-making.

  “You’d swear to that in front of a court, Faust?”

  “’Course I would. Even if it turned out to be a whole pack of lies, I’d swear to it anyway.”

  I unholstered my Colt, pulled back the hammer, and laid it down on the table between the three of us.

  He stared down at the gun, his eyes like rocks, his clay-like hands almost crushing the corner of the tablet. He licked his lips. “What do you want to talk about that requires a gun sitting here?”

  “Ain’t nothing much worth talking about can’t be talked about with a gun around ‘lest you say something that’d piss it off. Truth of the matter is, Kallum, you need to yank your head out the bankrolls and take a look at the big picture around you. You aren’t a king or a president. You aren’t royalty. Blackpeak is Blackpeak.”

  “You fucked with the process,” he said.

  “Sure. But anybody in their right mind either gets out of this place or dies. The ones who stay are either drunks, outlaws, or people like you and me—” I lifted the gun and pointed it at him like a baton, “—that think there might be something worth salvaging in this shithole town.”

  Me. Kallum. The Magnate. Peas in a pod and all, arm-wrestling over a pimple in the Texas drylands.

  “I’ll have you arrested,” he said.

  “Emp, you gonna arrest me?”

  He sipped morning whiskey.

  “Let’s not complicate this, Kallum. I bet if I were to look hard enough, this town ain’t even official. It ain’t on the books. Nobody cares about it from the outside, and barely anyone who cares about it from the inside.

  “Money ain’t forever,” I continued. “One day, like water, it’ll dry up. Your bars will stop getting customers. This place will tear itself apart from the inside. By that point, what little semblance of law you have will have crumbled, and there ain’t gonna be nobody around – not me, not Cicero, not Emp – to keep you from getting mauled to death by the very people you paid to lynch a golden woman.”

  I could smell his sweat. He stank like old chicken soup.

  “I want things back the way they were,” I said. “I want marshal back.”

  “César’s my marshal now.”

  “César’s a good kid,” I said. “Pay him as your bodyguard. Marshal ain’t his bag. No offense, Emp,” I said.

  Emp raised his hands.

  Kallum took in a breath. He stared at the gun.

  “Last night fades, Kallum. We move past it. We have that privilege. I want Cicero as my deputy. And when things go down,” I said, real quiet, making sure he could hear e
ach damn word, “I want you to keep your blinds closed. I don’t want to hear you questioning how or why I do my job. All that should matter is that, at the end of the day, you still got a place to lay your head and some money in your pocket.”

  “That’s all you want,” he said.

  “Let’s call this Herald situation a bust. You talk down the judge and the prosecutor, send them back home. This ain’t something we need to pursue anymore.”

  The veins in his forehead bulged out against his skin as if they were going to burst.

  “You are a remarkable fool, Elias. You don’t know what she – it – is. You haven’t a clue. You’re too busy playing your little black-powder games, but if that suits you, it suits me. In time, you’ll know I was right. Better off dead,” he said. “Better off dead.”

  Before I stepped out the door, Kallum found steel in his heart.

  “Only tyranny goes unchallenged and only fools rely on morality. What happened last night will come out in time, Elias Faust. When it does, I’ll be there to smile from across the courtroom.”

  “Holy shit,” shouted Grady Cicero. “Did you see that? It was like tossing a pebble at a cockroach’s ass a thousand yards out!”

  Shards of the green-dyed bottle rained down to the hard Blackpeak soil. Cicero tapped the edge of his bowler with the barrel of his .44.

  “Did you see that?” Cicero asked again.

  “Even if I was a blind man I’d have seen it, with all this yelling you’re doing about it. Don’t take much skill to shoot bottles fifty yards out,” I said.

  “Stage is yours, Marshal Asshole.”

  I squinted my eyes down the mast of the Yellowboy. I lifted my elbow and poised the sights on the colored drink-bottles sitting on the rock downrange.

  Cicero whispered, “Pressure’s on, muffin.”

  The rifle twitched. A quick crack sounded out over the dry fields. Somewhere back behind the bottle, a little volcano of dirt shot up from the earth. None of the bottles moved. Cicero started laughing so hard that he had to clutch his belly with his hand.

  And I’m the asshole?

  I worked the action. A smoking cartridge leaped into the air and plopped into the brim of my hat. “Between you and Emp,” I said, "I think I’m going to become a full-time drunk.”

  “Make sure you hit your mouth with the alcohol.”

  “I’ve got a gun,” I warned him.

  Cicero raised his revolver in one hand, turned a bit to the side, and then fired off a round. The very same bottle I had been pointing at burst into a glassy cloud. He sucked his teeth.“How many minutes was it?” he asked, dancing his question out the side of his mouth.

  “About three, give or take.”

  “That’s enough time to change the world.”

  “I hoped so.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  He emptied spent brass onto the ground. It gleamed at the end of his boots like bits of powder-burnt treasure. Eventually time would crush them down into the dirt, into fossils, into the past. Now or never. Time’s right. “I take it they’ll hide for a long time, those men. One speech doesn’t fix all the ugliness in the world, Faust. One speech, one bullet, or a thousand. Doesn’t put a dent in any of it. So you’re going to have to ask yourself whether it was worth it, whether three minutes and a fistful of seconds pulled the veil off the world, or whether it just tied it down tighter. Whether or not you were the same person at the start of that ticking clock,” he reasoned, “that you were at the end of it.”

  We both had our secrets. They filled up holes. Personal and precious.

  “You need to figure it out whether you want to be Caius, or whether you want to be Kent. For Blackpeak, for Kallum, and for yourself.”

  "Friends of yours?"

  He pulled a brick of a book from his breast pocket. The Collected Works of Shakespeare. Small enough for the pocket, and thick enough to kill a man. "You need to read more, Faust."

  He took my cigarette tin out of my shirt pocket and stuffed the book in. It weighed damn near a thousand pounds. Then he lit a cigarette and seemed mighty satisfied with himself. “From me to you,” he said.

  The black and faded mountains seemed like a thousand miles out. The heat on the badlands threw mirages in the air. I wondered where exactly Nycendera had gone off to, but I imagined I’d never really know. That was fine with me.

  I lifted up my shotgun from where it leaned against a rock.

  You’re either in, or you’re out.

  Breathe.

  The shotgun roared. Bottles vanished, sending the broken teeth of shattered glass out into the dirt. I cracked open the shotgun, ejected the two cartridges, then turned and smiled at Cicero.

  Cicero flipped me the bird.

  “Show-off,” he said.

  Part V

  The Mark

  25

  Nobody touched the gemstone knife in the town hall’s black door. Nobody wanted to. You’d have thought they’d burn their damn fingers off if they did. Suited me just fine. Town hall dances happened and there was the knife. A wedding happened once, and there was the knife as they threw rice and dead flowers, hip-hip-horray.

  One day Cicero and I stood outside the town hall to observe a cattle-trade. Men poked at cows’ ribs and women lifted their hems over lumps of cowshit. He said to me, “You ever see a bunch of animals this damn useless-looking?”

  A little boy came darting up to us, maybe six or seven, and he said, “Mister Faust,” and spit brown tobacco at my feet. “You gonn’ care if I take that knife?”

  “You’d split yourself wide open.”

  “Aw, you serious?” the boy said. “It’s just been stickin’ there for weeks.”

  “And it’s just gonna keep sticking there for weeks,” I said. “You can’t have it.”

  The boy’s packed lip pooched out. A dribble of brown rolled down his chin. “So why cain’t I have it?”

  “Yeah, why cain’t he have it?” Cicero said.

  “You ever met Peggy Winters,” I asked the boy.

  “Yassir.”

  “You ever seen her punch somebody’s lights out,” I said.

  “Nosir.”

  “You won’t see it either when she knocks your lips right off your face for stealing my knife.”

  The boy’s face tightened up. “That’s a demon knife. It ain’t yours.”

  I squatted down. I put my palms on my knees and thrust my face out to meet the boy’s dirty stare. “Damn right. Full of all that gold demon magic, the kind that’ll peel your skin right off your bones you decide to mess with it. Why else you think it’s still there?”

  His attention flicked to it. “Would it really do that?”

  “It’s full of bad magic,” I said. “Whole town knows it. Now you do, too.”

  “When you gonna take it down,” the boy asked.

  “When the bad magic’s gone.”

  “How you gonna know?”

  “Don’t suppose I ever will until it happens,” I said. “I ever catch you even thinking about touching that knife, whether it’s right now or the middle of the night when nobody’s around—” I pointed two fingers at my eyes, and then pointed at his and whispered, “—just remember, I see you.”

  The cattle-sale came and went. At least Blackpeak was consistent: they worked their days, they drank away their nights. Since the incident with Nycendera, the town settled into quietness, people lived on, and most seemed happy. Mostly.

  When the last cow trailed off, Cicero and I walked toward my office. “There a science to explain why everybody’s been on such good behavior lately?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know,” he said. We stood outside my office. The sky broke open. A night-time rain started. It knocked like falling knucklebones on the tin roof. “It’s no secret.”

  “Full moon?”

  He looked over his shoulder toward the town hall.

  Toward the knife.

  “They’re afraid o
f you,” he said. “They’re all afraid of you. Maybe only somewhat afraid of you. Maybe mostly afraid of what they don’t understand. Only two things spread quicker than gossip: brushfires and the clap. You and Sloman—” he paused, then snapped his collar up along his neck to guard himself from the downpour. “We had our reality bent just a little bit, Elias. What happens in this world happens because it makes sense. We’re several weeks out from non-sense, still reeling, and treading carefully. You understand.”

  You understand. Wielded with the careful courtesy of a schoolmarm with a switch.

  I jerked my chin toward the door. “You want a drink?”

  “I have an appointment with Nabby Lawson.”

  “You don’t watch out, there’s gonna be more than just reality getting bent.”

  He tapped his bowler. “Don’t I know it.”

  Then Cicero was gone. The silence had been hard-bought; if Blackpeak found order, then far be it from me to disturb that precious balance for as long as it’d last. I reckoned not for long, of course.

  But I wasn’t a very good bullshitter, especially not to myself.

  The only light inside my office came in slants and slashes through the barred windows. I’d gotten so familiar with the layout, though, that I could have wandered through it with my eyes closed. I kicked off my boots near the door, dropped my trousers, and emptied my pockets on my desk. I went for the matches and an oil-lamp.

  The pistol jabbed itself into my spine.

  “Don’t move,” the voice said from behind me. “Don’t breathe. And whatever you do, don’t speak until I damn well tell you to.”

  26

  “Where is it,” came the frantic voice. “The Eye. Where’d you stash it?”

  I squinted at the silhouette as it drifted from behind me toward my desk. It still had a gun on me. The intruder reeked of hot sweat and salt-lick. “Everything I own’s in that top desk-drawer,” I said.

  The gun didn’t move away. The figure yanked out the drawer by the handle and dumped it on my desk. A bottle of whiskey, some shackles, and the Shakespeare book all clattered out.