Horse of a Different Color

by Howard Waldrop

  As we left the shop he was putting up the Closed sign on the door. We heard the wire security gate scraping down behind us.

  Imagine an endless honky-tonk. The street looked like the inside of a juke-box—colored lights, noise and music everywhere, neon beginning to come on, and more guys yelling. The blinking lights said “Girls! Girls!! Girls!!!” And “30 Lovely Señoritas—18 Beautiful Costumes!” and “This is the place!”

  It was starting to get dark, and the outline of the comet appeared with the first stars. Bobby said tonight was going to be about the brightest it would get, and it would fade over the next month or two.

  A guy came toward us, singing:

  “Me nombre Jésus, hijo de José

  Hola-hola-hola”

  He passed us by, a broad grin on his face. A crowd of guys and soldiers headed down the street. We started to join them.

  Then I thought I heard crying. I looked over a couple of streets, and a woman was walking away toward the river. The sound was coming from her, and it was the most heart-wrenching thing I’d ever heard.

  “Hey!” I said. “That lady’s in trouble.”

  Bobby held up his rebozo-package like a shield. “It’s probably a scam. We go help her and we get jumped.”

  “That’s real crying,” I said. “That’s not fake.”

  We hurried to help her.

  She had gone out onto the river shore. She was wearing a long black dress and a thing like Little-Red-Riding-Hood, only in the fading light it looked blue. Her crying rose in pitch and force.

  I saw that there were two kids on the Texas side, and they were holding their arms out toward her.

  A guy with a fishing pole was coming up the riverbank toward us on our side. He stopped and dropped the pole and a couple of Rio Grande perch he had on a stringer.

  “Caramba! ” he yelled. “La Llorena! ” and ran away.

  The woman’s crying never stopped. The kids were crying, too, holding out their hands.

  The woman turned toward us. Inside the hood was the head of a horse.

  When we stopped running we were in front of a place called Salon de Baile.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said the guy out front.

  “Don’t ask,” said Bobby.

  It was a real dance hall with a conjunto band and actual couples dancing, and a stag-line, and on the other side of the room, women waiting to be asked to dance.

  Hey. This place is legit,” said Bobby. “There are two duennas with the women.”

  “What a let down,” I said.

  Bobby ordered two beers from the waiter. We drank them in a few seconds. I was still breathing hard from the run from the river.

  We watched the couples dance. They were dressed for a Saturday night (which is what it was) in their finest. There were even one or two guys in vaquero outfits, the full thing; one guy who was dancing had on a powder-blue outfit with silver trim and back at the table he’d come from was a big blue and silver sombrero across the back of a chair,

  “It’s different here,” I said to Bobby. “A guy can go out on a Saturday night in a powder-blue suit.”

  The band played faster and the dancers swirled around.

  Then there was a scream, and a woman collapsed and everyone ran to her. They stirred the air near her with their fans and their mantillas. She screamed from the floor.

  “El hombre pie de gallo! she yelled. “El hombre pie . . .”

  Bobby went over to listen. He came back.

  “She was dancing with the guy in the blue suit,” he said. “Muy sauvacito as she described him, very dapper. She was really dancing with the music; she looked down, and instead of boots, he had the feet of a rooster. A sign of the devil.”

  I looked over. The guy in the blue and silver outfit was gone, and so was his hat. I hadn’t seen anyone leave.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” I said.

  We were outside. The comet was so bright it lit the place up like there was a full moon, though I knew that wouldn’t be until the middle of next month.

  A wagon rolled down the street. It was the first wagon I’d seen in years, drawn by two mules. One had a child’s sombrero on its head, with holes cut out for its ears. I saw it from the neon lights of the joint next door.

  There was a woman standing outside, smoking a cigarette. A guy on a horse rode up, big sombrero, silver studs sparkling off the saddle from the strings of colored lights in the street.

  He asked for a light; he held a cigarillo down toward her.

  She looked up. She dropped the Zippo she’d taken out of her handbag and began to scream: Aaiiee! Aaiiee!

  A guy came out of the bar, stopped, and yelled: “Caracoles! El jinte sin cabeza!” And ran off. So did the woman.

  I looked up. Between the collar of the horseman’s jacket and the brim of his hat, I could see the top of a tree three blocks away, silver in the comet’s light.

  The guy shrugged his shoulders, turned his horse around and went off down the way. I watched the scenery through his invisible head. He turned left two streets down.

  We ran into the bar.

  It was very late. We were drunk. The street had about four or five people on it. The barkers had all gone inside, and some of the colored lights and neon signs had been turned off. If I weren’t so drunk, it would have looked sad.

  We made our way as best we could down the street. The comet blazed away, taking up half the sky.

  “This stuff’s getting heavy,” said Bobby. “Take it for a while.” He handed me the wrapped-up rebozo.

  He was right. It was heavy.

  We were looking for a place with nothing but red lights out front. We came to the corner of a cross-street.

  There was a well-dressed man standing in the diagonal corner; formal wear, shiny cufflinks, cummerbund, and all. Another guy was walking toward him on the side-street, whistling. There was some conversation between them—the walking man slowed and answered as he neared.

  I’ll swear the comet-light brightened then dimmed then brightened again by a half. I looked up, then back. Where the formally dressed man had been was a seedier-looking individual. His clothes had changed, his hair was wilder, he looked like a gargoyle Betty Boop; his head was as wide as his shoulders. There was a thing like a butterfly’s tongue under his chin, and it uncurled like an elephant’s trunk and went up the other guy’s nose; there was a sucking sound we heard from across the corner, and the other guy’s head deflated like a punctured beach ball and the light from the comet pulsed on and off, on and off. The other guy dropped straight down like a dead weight, and the guy with the big head was wiping gray stuff off his extended snout with both hands before curling it back under his chin.

  Then he looked over at us.

  Someone had come up behind us we hadn’t heard. We jumped a foot when he yelled: “Mierda! El Baron! El Brainiac! ”

  We heard footsteps running away.

  And then the baron was on us.

  He grabbed Bobby by the shoulders.

  If I weren’t drunk I’d have been thinking faster. I remembered great-great granduncle Breck’s admonition about assailants and trees. The nearest one was three blocks back and at least 50 feet tall.

  I swung the rebozo-package into the baron, hard enough to shatter the piggy-bank. The baron lurched back, then got a more secure grip on Bobby.

  The gold machete dropped out of the rebozo. I picked it up. The baron’s face was closer to Bobby’s, and the snout-tongue was unfolding and going toward his nose. Beyond Bobby I could see the dead guy lying crumpled on the opposite corner.

  The tongue was an inch from Bobby’s nose. The comet pulsed overhead.

  I swung the machete and chopped off the snout-tongue as close to the baron’s face as I could. The baron’s tongue hit the ground, writhing like a run-over snake. The baron squealed then, a cross between a feral hog’s and a giant bat’s that started a ringing in my ears.

  The baron ran away, gouts of blood splashing onto the
street, to the south.

  We ran north.

  We were still running when we reached the bridge. A party of Mexican citizens was starting over the bridge toward the U.S. One of them played a guitar, and a few of them were singing.

  I’d put the machete back in the rebozo with the broken bank. We ran past the singing party, and Bobby yelled to the border guards on the Mexican side: “Adios! Gracias!”

  We ran up to the U.S. station. “Make way for a couple of Americans!” I yelled.

  The U.S. guards were laughing. “Had enough of Mexico, boys?”

  I stopped and turned to the party of Mexican citizens who’d followed us onto the bridge.

  “How do you people live in that country!?” I yelled.

  We ran for the truck and made for home at 100 miles an hour.

  Afterword Thin, on the Ground

  Cross Plains Universe, edited by Joe Lansdale and Scott Cupp, was published for the 2006 World Fantasy Con in Austin, and the centenary of Robert E. Howard’s birth.

  We had a gang-signing at the convention—twenty authors, no waiting.

  There were extenuating circumstances in the writing of this story. The anthology had the permission of the Howard estate, with the exception of stories about Conan, which was a separate entity.

  But some jerks, who’d bought the print rights to Howard’s whole output, thought this gave them permission to tell people what they could or couldn’t write.

  For one thing, I was told I could not use the name Breckenridge Elkins in the story. Is there any doubt in your mind who Great-Uncle Breck was? Other people’s stories were affected in more major ways, and extensive rewrites ensued for them.

  I was relatively unscathed, but I resented the third-party jerks’ interference. Our choice: to rewrite and semi-please them, or face legal action that would hold the book up ’til after the convention, and the centenary.

  Added to that, this story was very much a reaction to George W. Bush (and his benighted Republican goons). He’d had the goodwill of the world after 9/11 and had pissed it all away and had Americans acting like banana-republic secret policemen.

  From the point of view of Mexico (and other Latin American neighbors), we were the ones acting like we’d lost our souls and had no lasting culture or dream life. “American Exceptionalism” indeed.

  The protagonist’s journey into that other, richer culture is comparable to Tim Bottoms and Jeff Bridges in McMurty’s The Last Picture Show.

  I still resent anyone telling me what I can dream about, publishing twits and George W. Bush not excepted.

  Kindermarchen

  Hansel was playing outside when his twin sister, Gretel, leaned out of their cottage.

  “Inside!” she yelled. Her hearing was better than his. He ran into the hut.

  Out their single window with the oilcloth shutters they saw the big birdlike things go by overhead. Usually they went beyond the horizon and then there were sounds and commotions far away, like distant thunder on a summer eve.

  The ogres who ran their kingdom were at war with the ogres of all the other kingdoms, and had been for years. It was only lately that the battles had come nearer to their neck of the forest kingdom.

  And part of it had come within their very household.

  They had asked their woodcutter father why a few weeks ago.

  “You want to know,” he said, “why it is your stepmother, the wife of a poor man with only an axe to his name, has to go to the village every day and listen to a parade of people who plead their cases to her?”

  He paused then, choosing his words. He was very tired. He had to go farther and farther each day to cut the kind of wood he needed to sell in the small village nearby. Even though it was summer, he now arrived home after dark. They did not know how he would make it through the coming winter; if indeed any of them would. Last winter there had been no food for sale in the village but dried turnips and radishes, and you could eat only so many of those.

  “There is the war,” he said to them that two weeks’ gone morning. ”Such things happen. A great edict came down from on high that children would have to be sent out of the way of the danger far to the East, to retreats. You would think that people concerned for the safety of their offspring would clamor for theirs to be the first to go. But it is not so. No one wishes to have their children leave in time of war. Who knows what may happen? Who will help with the household tasks? The harvests? All the young men were taken to help with the war long ago—and now all the young women have gone to the cities to work, or so they say. Now only the lame, the halt, old people like me, and the very young are left.”

  “But what does this have to do with our stepmother?” asked Hansel.

  “What does she know?” asked Gretel.

  “Children, children,” said their father. “My wife, your stepmother, was appointed to the committee to decide whose children stay and whose go. This was mandated by the ogres so that it would be done impartially and by the very people affected. Hence, she has to go each day to the village and sit with the others while people come and plead for their children to be allowed to remain with them.”

  “But, again, why her?” asked Gretel.

  “Dear Gretel and Hansel,” their father had said that morning two weeks ago. “I know that you do not get along with your stepmother. Your poor mother died giving birth to you. I met your stepmother in my only trip to the big city far beyond our village while you were still being nursed by other women. Your stepmother was a learned woman, and when she fell in love with me, she defied her family to marry me. She lost everything: her dowry, her inheritances. It has been a hard life for her here. You must give her the credit for following her heart—no matter how disagreeable she is to you. Her intelligence was recognized by others on the committee, and she was appointed. Do you see?

  “We must do all we can for the kingdom,” he continued, “in these difficult times, even if that’s just to keep doing the same things we’ve done for fifty years.”

  They had told him that day that they still did not understand.

  “In time, you will,” he had said.

  This very morning he had picked up his axe, and then he had patted their heads. “I have far to go today, and then I will go to the village where your stepmother is meeting with the others, and we will be home in the evening. There is bread and cheese in the pantry. Do not let strangers into the house, and be my very good children.”

  So saying, he had gone.

  When he and their stepmother came home that night, their father could not meet their eyes. Their stepmother went to the pegs where their clothes hung and took their few blouses and pants down and began putting them in two sacks without saying a word. She went to the pantry and put hunks of bread and cheese in each sack. Then she handed a sack to each.

  “Sleep with these,” she said. “You leave at dawn from the village. Your names are on the list.”

  “We must do something,” whispered Gretel after her father and stepmother were asleep in their corner of the hut.

  “I have a plan,” said Hansel. “I will drop breadcrumbs as we go, wherever we are bound. We will get away and follow the breadcrumbs back to our village.”

  “Won’t they come back for us when they see we are missing?” asked Gretel.

  “We will worry about that when it happens. I don’t want to leave our father, our woods, our village, even if it means having to live here with the stepmother.”

  “Nor I,” said Gretel. “I hope your plan works, Hansel.”

  For an ogre, he had a kindly face. He was dressed all in black in the ogre-army fashion, but he looked like every little ogre’s favorite uncle. Some ogres didn’t like being around people, but he seemed to be treating it as just another of his military duties—probably better than being killed by other ogres in massed battle.

  “Children,” he said. “We have a long way to go to get you away from this threatened area to one of safety far behind the lines. There you will be with many many
children of your own age; you will play; there are toys galore for your choosing, and you will get to eat sweets and candy to your fill.”

  “Can such a place exist?” asked one child to his neighbor.

  “What’s that?” asked the ogre-officer. “Oh, I assure you! Why, my very own children have begged me to take them there many times—I always answer the same: it’s a place only for human children! You can’t go there—and always they cry. I sometimes bring them home sweets from the great pile just inside the gates—I know I’m not supposed to do that, but I love my children, so I do.

  “But”—he pulled himself to his fine full height—“back to duty. Though the place to which we go is wonderful—just wonderful—the way is long and hard and fraught with danger—attack from enemies, on the ground or from the air, could come at any time. We will march single file, keeping to the deep woods. We will have also to sleep in those same woods tonight; sorry, but it is two full days’ march to the Children’s Retreat. I will ask after you say good-bye to your parents that you not speak again to each other until we arrive at the retreat; no, not even tonight when we stop to rest—our enemies are everywhere, even in the forest in the middle of the night.

  “My soldiers”—he pointed to the young ogre-soldiers who carried great packs and held the leashes of two-headed ogre-dogs. The soldiers looked bored, and the dogs lay sleepily at the soldier’s feet. They carried great whips, but they were neatly coiled at their belts—“will be among you to keep order and make sure you are safe. Any orders they give you, you should treat as mine.