The mountain man was still there the next day, seated cross-legged beside the adamant intruder, staring fixedly at him and not moving a muscle. Occasionally Wrathwell would glance in his direction and snicker. Gathering their courage, more and more citizens emerged from their waterless abodes to ascend the slight hill from which in normal times the town spring sprang. Much conversation ensued. Unencumbered by the cares and concerns of their worried elders, children began to run around both rocker and sitter, laughing and making jokes. One stick-wielding older boy of fifteen attempted to poke the poker-faced mountain man with a long stick, only to find himself knocked to the ground by a gob of spittle the size of a hen’s egg, which slammed into his left cheek with the force of a soggy, beslimed washrag. As Malone had not moved and the spit stank of horse, suspicion eventually fell on the mountain man’s mount. Except that Worthless was hundreds of yards away, in town, standing alongside a newly destabilized mare whose recently acquired expression both puzzled and alarmed its owner.
As the end of the week drew near, word of the confrontation had spread to nearby towns, bringing curious visitors (with their welcome jugs of water) to view the standoff—or rather, the sit-off. As near as anyone could tell, while Wrathwell continued to rock, his hirsute audience had not budged. Not to eat, drink, defecate, curse, cry, sniffle, cough, or otherwise suggest he was actually formulated of anything other than the solid rock on which he sat. It was as if he had been transformed into one of those local, mysterious, human-shaped granite formations sometimes worshipped or feared by the local Ute.
For his part, Wrathwell appeared to be growing increasingly uneasy. By the second week he would sometimes turn to the staring, unmoving, unblinking mountain man and let loose a stream of curses that would cause the women in the ever-growing audience to turn away and blush, or hastily emplace their hands over the ears of wide-eyed children.
“Nobody outsets Versus Wrathwell, do you hear me! Why don’t you move, you chunk of monkey meat? Why don’t you say something, offspring of a whore and a water horse?” Suddenly, he leaned sharply to his right. At this first non-rocking motion, several in the crowd of onlookers gasped and strong men stepped back.
“So it’s a settin’ contest you want, is it? Well and done, then, well and done. Nobody outsets me, and nobody outstills, and by the tip of my beard, I’ll see you move first and surrender, I will! I’ll have your soul for an earring to hang on my own, and you’ll die there dry and desiccated with your black damned eyes wide open!”
At that, Versus Wrathwell stopped rocking.
Gleaming black eyes met rheumy blue. Lids froze high and never blinked. The children who had run and laughed suddenly found reason to return to the safety of home and school. Muttering to themselves, mothers and saloon hookers alike soon followed, until only the strongest of strong men were left in audience.
And still the stares of the two men were locked, hard and unmoving as crossed swords, locked in combat as deadly. Clouds began to gather overhead, and the promise of rain that might refill empty storage barrels and tanks drew still more onlookers away from the confrontation. But while the sky grew dark and lightning began to crackle and wind gusted strong enough to stir beard black and beard white, no rain fell. It was as if such unrelenting stubbornness on the part of the seated pair angered the heavens themselves, and they responded with sizzle and flash, thunder and ground-searing bolt.
“By the scar on my sainted grandmother’s neck,” one man breathed the following morning as he returned to resume gazing upon the unnatural square-off, “the mountain man—he ain’t breathing!”
It was true. Amos Malone’s immense chest had grown still. No air was sucked in through dirty nostrils nor hissed from between slightly parted lips. He was sitting stiller than anyone could set. Across from him, ensconced tightly in his chair, Versus Wrathwell looked momentarily startled. Then, white and gold teeth clenched, he too ceased breathing. Neither man breathing, but neither man dead.
This, the remaining onlookers agreed, was settin’ with a vengeance.
It was a sight so disturbing that it sent all but two friends, among the toughest of all the miners in southern Colorado, fleeing townward.
Malone stared at Wrathwell. Wrathwell glared at Malone. Then the mountain man did something neither miner could quite understand, though they understood it clear. He stopped moving at all.
He stopped moving inside.
Asa Green didn’t quite comprehend what he was experiencing, but his friend Hiram confirmed it. It was as if they could see through parts of the mountain man. As they stared, Malone’s left hand started to detach from his wrist. Fluttering like a flesh-colored butterfly, one ear commenced to shimmy and drift away from the side of his head. When Malone’s right eye began to emerge from its socket, quivering like an orphaned cue ball, Hiram Hopkins let out a tremulous moan and fled. Of the curious, only Asa Green still remained as witness to what followed.
The face of the old man cracked wide in an alternating gold and white smirk. He began to laugh. “Told yez! Told yez, told yez, told yez! Nobody outsets Versus Wrathwell! Nobody! I once blocked a clipper from leaving Boston Harbor. They paid me. Another time was the door to the safe in Philadelphia’s main bank. They paid me. So will these miserable would-be gold-leachers! They’ll pay me. Everybody pays Versus Wrathwell. And you, you’ll pay, big as you are. You’ll pay with…with…what the hell this side of Constantinople is happening?”
Versus Wrathwell was also coming apart. As Green, no longer brave but too terrified to run, looked on, the old man’s eyes drifted out of his head. Then they began to rotate around his skull. They were soon joined by his ears. Then his fingers detached, one by one, from his hands, and commenced to swing moonlike around his jerky-tough body. Above and all around, dark clouds swirled like overcooked chili. Thunder bellowed. Through the flashes of lightning, Asa Green saw more and more of the old man’s body float free, until every digit and external protrusion was orbiting his skinny frame.
Eyes and ears, fingers and toes, nose and hair—all swam circuslike about him. When his torso came apart and his organs began to form a crack-the-whip around the oldster’s now empty center, the miner nearly fainted. That he retained consciousness and memory of the event was due more to the shock that prevented him from passing out than to any innate audacity.
“No!” Detached from his mouth and from the rest of him, Wrathwell’s lips were shouting feebly even as they too began to reduce themselves to their component parts. “It can’t be! This cannot be! Nobody outstills Versus Wrathwell! No—body…”
Flying farther and farther apart, growing smaller and smaller as they did so, the constituent bits and pieces of the curious old man eventually lost all contact with one another, until one by one the individual submicroscopic specks of ugliness that had been Versus Wrathwell let out a crackle and a pop before being sucked up by the swirling, roaring clouds.
Gradually the arid storm began to subside, the clouds to turn first brown and then golden and finally white, until, exhausted, they were much relieved to abdicate their agitation in favor of blue sky and bright sunshine.
Meanwhile Amos Malone’s eye floated back to reinsert itself neatly into its empty socket, massive fingers fastened themselves firmly back to his hand, and he was full restored. Only then, for the first time in nearly two weeks, did he blink.
Something touched the back of Asa Green’s neck. Nudged out of the paralysis into which he had fallen, the hardy, toughened miner screamed once. Whipping around and looking back two sneezes short of a heart attack, he saw that it was only the muzzle of the mountain man’s horse. A great relief wheezed out of him. As he rose shakily to his feet, Malone was doing likewise. The mountain man eyed his mount.
“Yeah, I’m hungry, too. Let’s go get something to eat.” He squinted at the still-trembling Asa Green, then nodded in the direction of the steel control wheel behind the empty ch
air. “Town’s thirsty. ’Bout time t’ remedy that, wouldn’t you say?”
Fighting to control his shaking, Green cautiously approached the empty rocking chair. There was no sign, anywhere, of the old man who had occupied it so long and so obstinately. Gingerly, the miner reached down. His hands moved freely. Taking hold of the arms of the chair, he pulled. It shifted without resistance. Pulling harder, he lifted the heretofore unapproachable piece of furniture off the ground. It rose without resistance. Then, mindful of the crying children and dry-throated women and his own burning thirst this past unpleasant month, he spun right around and heaved it as far as he could. Describing a high arc, the aged birch struck the surrounding rocks and shattered into kindling.
Turning thankfully back to the stolid, silent mountain man, Asa Green nodded, bent, and began to turn the control wheel. It rotated easily, almost gratefully, in his callused hands. The gush of water as the formerly restrained spring once more filled the pipe with life was like the sound children make when school lets out for summer. From the town below, cries of surprise and then shouts of joy filled the air. It was September in southern Colorado, it was hot, but for the town at the base of the hill it was Christmas come early.
Straightening, the miner stared at the mountain man. “I don’t know what you did, sir, and I don’t know what I saw, but speakin’ for myself I am eternal grateful.” He gestured at the community below. “My friends and neighbors are assuredly also, and forever will be.”
Malone nodded once, then walked over to and swung himself up on his peculiar horse. The animal grunted and proceeded to utter what Green would later swear was possibly the absolute worst, most insulting single word in the entire English language, stretching all the way back to the Saxon, and ambled forward.
“Wait! Sir, if you wouldn’t mind—if you don’t mind—what exactly happened here?”
Malone did not pull back on the reins he was holding, but Worthless stopped nonetheless. “Why, feller-me-lad, ’twas all a matter of settin’. Of seeing which man could sit the most still. I’ve done such myself before, in other lands and days, and thought I could do so well enough here on the fringe o’ your parched reality. See, now and then I like t’ set a spell myself.
“What finally happened was all about what goes to make up a man. And mebbe pretty much everything else. We all of us seem to ourselves to be still when we set, but in truth we’re not. Though we cannot see them, the parts of which we are made are always in motion. Look at yourself. What d’you see? Movement, or stillness?”
Green looked down at himself, then back up at the mountain man. “Not to stand here in dispute with you, sir, but I must confess that I look still and unmoving to me.”
Malone smiled broadly, which action had the remarkable effect of transforming his appearance from that of a two-legged incarnation of imminent Doom to something approaching a sooty Saint Nick.
“A common illusion, friend. I assure you thet the tiniest parts of us are always in motion, though far too small to see. When I was at the Sorbonne, I discoursed much on the phenomenon with a charming young lady named Maria. Maria Skłodowska. Old Greek feller name o’ Democritus was also mentioned, I recall, and other learned gentlemen of antiquity. I’ve come t’ believe that each of us is at base composed of particles thet choose to comprise us. I conclude it is all a matter o’ electivity, this life and existence. We choose t’ hold together, therefore we are. I therefore have decided to call these tiny bits o’ which we are made ‘elections,’ as they elect to keep things together, much as we do with our country.” Raising his gaze, he focused on a part of the now-cerulean sky.
“But stay too still, fer too long, and the elections o’ which we are composed kin no longer hold together. They begin t’ fly apart. It is the same, I think, with everything. Rocks and trees, water and clouds, stars and sun. All and everything is made up o’ these tiny, unseen elections. The late unpleasantness who called himself Versus Wrathwell sat too still and too long and too tight, until his bits could no longer elect t’ remain together. Could no longer hold to their little orbits, as it were, and became free to fly off in whatever and whichever direction they wished.”
Asa Green found his own gaze turning to the same portion of sky at which the mountain man was staring. “So they flew apart. D’you think they kin come together again?” Blinking at the restored sunshine, he lowered his sight until it was once more fixed on the huge man sitting straight and sure on the decidedly peculiar horse. “To make that hideous old feller whole afresh?”
“I doubt it.” This time Malone did chuck the reins. Muttering under his breath, the stallion moved off toward town. “Once set free, I don’t think elections can bind together easy again. Leastwise, not in a way that would result in producing something like Versus Wrathwell.”
“Where you goin’?” Green called after the butt end of the stallion that was as unidentifiable as it was massive.
“Town, o’ course. I’m hungry, and I’m thirsty, and I’ve a mighty powerful urge to pay an extended visit to the nearest long drop.”
“There’s water now. Water aplenty.” Asa Green raised his voice as the mountain man rode slowly down the hill. “Thanks to you, Mr. Malone sir, there’s all the water you can drink!”
Turning slightly in the saddle, Amos Malone slapped firmly at something that was scuttling about within one of his saddlebags. It promptly went still, though a small puff of irritated gray smoke emerged from where the opening was not quite sealed.
“Water! Why, feller-me-lad, d’you think I’m mad?”
Ghost Wind
Not just Native Americans but many traditional cultures believe that every manifestation of Nature is possessed of a spirit. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tree, a rock, a river, or a cricket, the lowest meadow or the highest mountain. In these mythologies everything is alive in some fashion and therefore deserving of respect and perhaps, depending on its nature, propitiation. The Makonde, a tribe of modest dimension in East Africa, not only have a name for such spirits (shetani), but their best artisans turn blackwood into spirit sculptures of exquisitely terrifying proportions.
Many such communities believe in an “ill wind” far more deeply than our casual saying is meant to imply. But imagine: If an ill wind is a spirit, then what is the spirit of the spirit? If a tree has a soul, what lies beyond that?
And would we want to encounter it…?
* * *
—
“I’m not going in there.”
Barker’s manicured fingers rolled and twisted like a nervous baker kneading invisible dough. “But you got to, Doc. The man’s plain ill. Ain’t there an oath or somethin’ about how you got to take care of a body when they’re sick?”
“A human being, yes.” A wizened Doc Stanton kept his distance from the door that either led to room 12 of Bales Barker’s hotel or to Hell. “I’m just not sure that the thing reposing within is human.”
Outside, the mournful breeze that had been blowing all morning had picked up, sending papers and other debris whipping down Main Street.
“He’s human enough.” Both men turned to look at Hearts Doland, who had emerged from bed considerably earlier than was the professional gambler’s wont. Whip-thin of body, mien, and mustache, he calmly returned the questioning stares of the doctor and the owner of the venerable establishment. “Two days ago Addie the Well spent the night with him. That not-so-good woman lies resting still in her bed, sleeping off the aftereffects of what I am told was a profitable but wearying encounter. I had occasion to speak to her about the evening in question as she was dragging her way up the stairs. It is plain from the brief words we had that she would testify to his humanness, exceptional though it might be.”
Still wringing his hands, a pleading Barker turned back to the town physician. “You see, Doc? You’re obligated to treat him. You got to make him well. It’s your sacred duty. It’s the right
thing to do. The poor man is suffering, Doc!”
Stanton’s gaze narrowed behind his wire-rim glasses. “You want him out of your hotel really badly, don’t you?”
Barker met the older man’s stare. “Please, Doc. You gotta help him. You gotta help me. When he sleeps, he snores, and when he snores, the vibration starts to workin’ the nails out o’ the walls and the floor beams. If he coughs, the sound wakes every guest in the place and the horses in the stable next door try to bolt. And if he blows his nose— if blows his nose…” The hotel owner shuddered. “You don’t wanna know, Doc.”
Stanton straightened his trim, elderly frame. “I am a trained physician, my good man. Cum laude Boston University of Medicine. A description of mere nasal expectoration, however extreme, would not intimidate me.”
Barker nodded toward the closed door to room 12. “Then for the love of mercy, Doc, go in there and see to the poor traveler — before he brings my place down around my ears! I’ve had four transit customers left already this week because of his roaring and snuffling.”
The doctor’s lips tightened. “Very well then.” He took a deep breath. “I expect you are right: an oath is an oath.” He faced the door, then glanced back. “I would be beholden to both you gentlemen if you would accompany me. To, um, bear witness to, um, whatever treatment it may be required that I apply.”
The others hesitated. Then Bales shrugged. “It’s my hotel. I reckon I’ve no option in the matter.” Beside him, Doland blew a puff of imaginary cigar smoke.
“My life is all a gamble anyway. I will have your back, Doc.”
The door to room 12 was not locked. There was neither reason nor need why it should be. No one in their right or even their wrong mind who knew anything of its present occupant would have thought to enter with malice in mind.
Mad Amos Malone Page 24