His Ragged Company

by Rance Denton

  “It’s flattering you think of us as friends at all,” the Magnate said. “There’s good reason I’ve been in your head this long, Faust. I’d like us to know each other better.”

  “I reckon you already do. I’m not complicated.”

  “But you’re loyal.”

  “To Blackpeak.”

  “Why?” he asked. He knocked the tin against the palm of his hand, drawing attention to it.

  It was mine. That was my cigarette holder. “Because everyone needs someone else to make mistakes on their behalf,” I said.

  “Aren’t you tired of picking up the pieces?”

  “It’s the only thing I’m good at.”

  He opened the tin. A stern row of rolled cigarettes, each laid next to one another like white-wrapped corpses, drew my gaze. “If you’re under the impression that my purpose is to terrorize the town or claim some semblance of power, I apologize for being so opaque. In recognizing my whole menagerie of oversights, I imagine a part of that your perception’s in my title. In the end, I can’t ever live up to expectations. But men listen to titles where they might never listen to names. Magnate. Mayor. Marshal.”

  “The all-mighty M.”

  “If it weren’t for our movement in the shadows, Blackpeak would wither up and die,” he said. “It’s damn hard work, running a syndicate under everyone’s noses. Which brings us to the main problem at hand.” He held a cigarette between two fingers and tapped its edge against my chest. “You.”

  “Don’t see how me doing my job has become such a problem for you, Gregdon.“

  “Magnate will suffice,” he interrupted, putting the smoke in his mouth and lighting it with a match off the altar. “Or Father, if you so choose.”

  “You want the man who killed Billy addressing you that way?”

  “It’s just a name. At times, one of endearment. At other times, one of loyalty and respect.”

  “Got none of that for you.”

  Puffs of smoke started curling out of his nose and out of the corner of his mouth. I could smell the tobacco, ripe and sharp, like it had little fingers trying to beckon me. “Give me an hour’s work with you, Faust, and you won’t have any choice but to call me by that name.” I wanted a cigarette bad enough that I thought I felt my knee starting to twitch.

  “Some family,” I said. “Your own son was afraid of you. Afraid enough to put a bullet right in his own head.”

  “I have many children.”

  “Sandshades,” I said. “Whatever the hell they are.”

  “All my children, if not from the womb of my dead love like Billy and Curtis, then from the industry of my own hands. And a little outside help.” Still casually smoking his cigarette, the Magnate circled me, tossing his gilded locust-thorn in the air, catching it with no fear of its bite. “I’m too old for games. Forcing your obedience suits me.”

  “And you think that’ll let you control my town?”

  “Lookit that,” he sing-songed. “A man proclaiming ownership. As a badge-wearing man of the law, there’s some part of you that’s invested in Blackpeak more than anybody else, I wager. That’s what I think I’ll need,” he said, jabbing a finger against my temple, “to bleed the Shattered Well’s location right out of you. It picked you because you care.”

  The Magnate, between puffs of his cigarette – of my cigarette, stolen right out of my own tin – tilted his head. Listened to nothing, or to something only he could hear…

  Then, to Red, he commanded, “I think you can unshackle our guest. I don’t forsee him being much of a problem at the moment. I’ll need his hands.”

  “As you wish.”

  Red came up behind me as I sat there. I felt the cold metal slide away. I immediately brought my hands out in front of me and rubbed my wrists.

  “Here.” He threw the tin in my direction. I caught it between my hands. He threw the matches next. I took out one of the heartily-rolled cigarettes, lit it, and leaned back, taking in the coarse smoke.

  Could you buy time? I wondered that. It was a damn fool’s phrase. You bought things with money. Sometimes with blood. Time wasn’t something you could put in a bag. In this place I felt time pressing down on me like a fist. Not much left. “What made you like this? What forced you to live like this?”

  From a glass decanter on the table beside his chair, the Magnate poured himself two more fingers of whiskey. He lingered, opened his fancy book, thumbed through a few pages. “What I experienced was a revelation. Maybe you’ve never had a moment such as that, Faust, but I have. For some people, it’s the sudden discovery of God, the occurrence of a so-called miracle. There are events we witness that seem magnificent, unheralded by anything but the existence of something wholly beyond our conception.

  “They change us. Some for the better. Me,” he said, “for the worse.”

  An underhanded toss. The shining locust-thorn flew through the air. I caught it.

  “Understand,” he said.

  Memories bled from it, right into me.

  She was gold as an idol. I loved her. I loved her in that way you love all beautiful objects: with a complete abandonment of reason, and the sheer satisfaction that possession alone provided you some stunning advantage over the whole world. I won her. Her heart. Her eyes. Her mouth. I won her.

  God, my head. Throbbing. Swimming in a strange sea…

  “Come with me,” she said, and I said to her, “Where,” and she touched me and we were in love, and all the pure Gregdon futures my father had forged for us blew away like old dust. A future in railroad steel trickled away. I saw no future that included me.

  But her. My God, she was the whole future. She was the World.

  “Come with me,” she said, and I said to her, “Where,” and she touched me

  and we – I knew –

  could be

  one.

  A hot storm of words, ideas, notions, feelings. Tore me into pieces, reknitted me, made me forget I was Elias Faust—

  Her name, Illemone, came to me like smoke. I knew her before I knew her. She was soft as a silken wrap. She whispered dances in my ear and blinded me with the music of her being. I’d found her bathing in the brown and putrid waters of Shelburne Bay, naked and alone and gleaming like carved metal amid the film and flotsam and foam.

  “Tell me,” she said, kissing me.

  “I need you,” I said.

  The miracles she drew with her fingers from the air looked like perfect triangles. I traced them with my eyes in childlike wonder. I could never go back. Lights shone inside her and outside her. The sky bent and almost shattered under the power of her voice.

  When she wafted like a vapor toward the center of the country, she beckoned me to be the downbeat to her pounding heart, to leave it all behind: the preordained legacy, the promise of affluence and steel carved out of ore and industry in my father’s footsteps…

  A flicker. Me again. All me. In my shuddering hand, the locust-thorn burned. “What are you trying to show me,” I growled. “What are you trying to—”

  In the hot Midwestern plains, where the earth cracked like reptile skin, she summoned the stalks of green flowers from the soil. She stepped from the back of our wagon and ferns and blossoming life sprang up in the wake of her every step. I said to her, “I love you,” and she breathed into me and said, “I know, I know,” and across the World, we

  left

  traces of

  Her,

  multitudes of verdant green, endless miles of sprouts and shoots and rolling nature birthed from the bosom of a dying world—

  I wanted to know how. She wanted me to want to know.

  It was under the gold Texas moon that I begged her, “Show me,” and she did. In the shade of a tree, she broke off a branch with thorns like a spider’s feet. The gold of her skin bled into the thorny branch, gilding it, gilding me, gilding us,

  making

  us

  one.

  “Stop,” I gasped, realizing only too late that my hand clench
ed violently around the locust thorn, and if I didn’t watch out, it’d pierce right through my skin, right out the back of my hand. “Get the hell out of me.”

  Her belly grew fat and large like a hill on the dryland horizon and I told her, “I love you,” and she said, “You must,” and I followed her, chained by unseen bonds, addicted to her. Outside her, I yearned for her; inside her, I found wonder. Her triangles became mine: all the unseen rules of the world in absolute order, functioning in unison when I demanded them. When we hungered, she summoned gardens and orchards from marks drawn in the sand. We slaked our thirst with the juices of otherworldly fruits. And when our minds wanted for the softness of another dimension, we awakened poppies from the sand and milked them for the wonders

  hidden like liquid

  pearl

  inside their bulbous eyes.

  My skin wanted to crawl away from my bones. My head and mind swam in a sea, barely holding on. My cigarette, burnt to a blackened nub between my knuckles, crumbled into ash. The Magnate’s smile stretched in a vicious, liquid crease across a face that wore decades like armor and paint…

  “How was that cigarette?” he asked me, knowledge in his voice—

  —as she scooped handfuls of the crumbling Texas soil into her ancient palms. Illemone gleamed in the sun and our children – our boys, our twins – toddled like clumsy ogres through the too-tall grasses. Grains fell between her fingers, and she said, “Do you want me to teach you,” and I said, “Always,” and she said—

  “Do you want to learn how to bring life from death?”

  But we both knew the answer, for women gold as idols turn men into fools as thick as stone.

  “I love you,” I told her, because it had always worked before; “I love you,” I told her, because it had always kept her so near, but she was slipping, slipping, slipping, and the gold in her skin wore the pale fire of a dying star. “I love you,” I said, I screamed, “I love you, I love you,” weightless and unfeeling, just noise to fill the air where silence would be, an honest-to-goodness lie…

  “Xa’anshangerrad,” Illemone said to me, filling my hands with her sand before she clasped my cheeks in her golden hands—

  Before I lost her.

  “Come back,” I begged.

  But she left me with sand. The bitch, she left me with sand, and faded like a laughing dream.

  I fell to my knees, my hands, my coin clattering to the cavern floor. I clenched my teeth so damned hard I feared they’d shear themselves to nubs. The walls of the world flickered like water. I opened my mouth to suck in breath, to be sure it was my breath, though God, as near to those moments as I’d been, I swear Illemone’s palms still warmed me. “She wasn’t…human,” I said.

  “When your mind starts thinking outside the boundaries we’re born to respect, you begin realizing that things around you aren’t as they seem,” the Magnate assured me. “She was far from human.”

  “You want her back,” I said. “That’s why you want the Shattered Well. That’s why you want your Wish.”

  A momentary tremble rolled through his body, enough to set his robes alive with motion. Bloody, lonely, and unoccupied, his fist, scarred from a thousand clutches around that gilded thorn, crashed against my temple.

  I crumbled. He picked the thing from my grip.

  The memory turned cold and melted like ice.

  “To presume the weaknesses of a younger man are reason enough for him to set the world on its head when he’s an older one is pedestrian thinking. No, Elias. Love and infatuation belong to lesser men. She gave me boys that were half hers, bred from me like…like fucking prize cows, and then she left me with them.” His words came out with frantic, manic energy. “Left me nothing of her, and yet left me with everything to remember.” His pointer-finger knocked against his forehead.

  As he spoke, I formulated possibilities in my head. But every time I looked, the sandshades were still staring. Red and Ivanmore were still behind me. Getting out of this compound was going to take exactly what Gregdon blabbered on about: a miracle. Especially with my vision wavering like smoke, and my brain half-scrambled, half-firing.

  “Existences are being wasted in Blackpeak. People live shit lives of regret and sorrow. But I refuse,” he said. “The Well’s here, somewhere in these mines, somewhere beneath them, somewhere around them, and if I have to turn you into a motherfucking slave just to rip it out of you – to get to it, and get to her – I will do so with sheer happiness.”

  When he turned around to me, his red robes snapped around his ankles. In his right hand he squeezed the thorn. In his left, he held a curved knife like the ones I’d seen Uno, Dos, Tres, and Seis wield. A talon-blade. He pointed it at. “Returning to the ordinary after you’ve witnessed the extraordinary is just a waste, Faust, unless you can bring some of the extraordinary back with you.”

  I looked down to the triangular coin still clasped in my palm.

  Life from death.

  His hairy nostrils flexed and closed. “I’ll ask the Well for my boys again, shed of everything that made them hers. I’ll ask for Illemone, who gave me a morsel of her power, and left me, fled from me, before I even knew what questions to ask about the wonders she’d given me. I’ll extract her from whatever pit she dwells in, whatever piece of the universe she calls her own.

  “I’ll drag her to me and tear the rest of the magic in her veins out of her.”

  He didn’t stop walking in those energetic, wild circles, like a raven trying to find a perfect perch. Blood plopped from his hand. He went back to his drink in Poindexter’s glass, emptied it, then let the glass fall from his hands. It shattered against the smooth-stoned floor.

  “I want to show you a trick, Faust,” he said. “I want to show you the power she gave me. I want to show you the power that will turn you into one of my sandshades.”

  His boots scuffed across the floor. His shoulders, set for conflict, swayed forward. He gripped the talon-blade.

  The Magnate came for me.

  He never lunged, never ran. Just kept striding, fierce-like. Chin bent down, knife out, thirsty for blood. When he got within several feet of me, I made my move.

  I thought at first that I slipped. A surge of warmth ran down my legs and it felt like bricks had been dropped on my toes. They didn’t cooperate. I wobbled. I put my hands up. My arms stretched out, turned to responseless ribbon. Too late…

  The Magnate reached up and struck me in the throat with the base of his palm. His red robes became like living streams of blood. They writhed in the air and dripped all around us but never left stains. The rocks had become a black ocean. I thought I saw stars twinkling on the ceiling.

  I fell to my knees. The Magnate rammed his knee against my chin. Pain was somewhere else, like I’d all but forgotten how to feel it. He grabbed me by the hair with the hand holding the knife. He forced my head down flat on the altar.

  “Soaked your tobacco in formaldehyde,” the Magnate whispered in my ear as he raised up one of my rubbery arms and lay it on the altar beside me. “It hits you like a stampede, runs right over you, and you don’t feel a thing until it’s too late for you to realize what’s false and what’s true.”

  He yanked my index finger out and pressed it down on the altar. A million multi-colored bugs crawled in and out of the cracks in the stone. I could feel them crawling on me too, inside my clothes, inside my brain…

  “I want you to understand what I understood.”

  He adjusted his glasses with the edge of the knife. Then he over-extended my left index finger and poised it underneath the shiny crescent-moon of the talon-blade’s edge.

  The weapon smiled at me.

  The Magnate jammed his hand down.

  The blade slit through skin.

  Metal crunched through a meaty joint.

  Blood everywhere.

  It took me just a few seconds to realize my finger was gone.

  I screamed. I didn’t feel the agony at first, but there was a deep throb pulsing
through my bones. Blood ran from the knuckle like a butcher’s stream. The digit that used to be mine just sat there until the Magnate picked it up between his thumb and his own index finger and examined it. The Magnate’s face still looked like fleshy mud. He had four eyes and a serpent’s tongue. Or did he?

  Like a child playing in sand, the Magnate used the severed base of my finger and drew on the smooth stone altar like it was paper. My stomach started to dance like a jumping-bean inside my body. He drew a sloppy triangle with my blood.

  “There are two essential components one needs to perform magic, Faust. It’s a surprisingly simple equation, and Illemone, my fairness that she was, had it in her like second nature. One—“ he tapped my forehead with my severed finger, “—a constituent, a gate, a portal – an aid of sorts through which to bring magic into our reality. And secondly, the desire to do so. An emotion strong enough to break through that gate and bring the power with you.

  “Why the drugs,” I said, trying not to focus too much on the blinding sunlight in the Magnate’s eyes. “Why’d you lace my cigarette—“

  “I did it with no intent to offend or disarm you,” he said. “Really, it’s a gift. For Illemone and me, it was opium. She demanded that we modify our perception when I was learning how to break down the barriers of the ordinary. It’s just a component, an opportunity to glimpse the world through new lenses. But we work with what we commonly have, don’t we, Ivanmore?”

  “We make it work,” the undertaker said. “However we need to.”

  The Magnate reached across the great seas that separated us to pat my cheek like a doting parent. “I need you ready to shed your understanding of the ordinary. The mind doesn’t take kindly to…intrusive ideas.”

  Which is when it occurred to me: the Magnate had been intending this end for quite some time for me. “You groomed me,” I said. “The paper. That voice of yours in my head. Little hints and slivers of your world peeking into mine. You want to turn me into one of those goddamn shade things—”

  “But those goddamn shade things,” he said, “were quite good and dead before I got my hands on them. You’re different.”