The Very Best of F & SF v1

by Gordon Van Gelder (ed)

  IV

  The beans were like bullets, the corn tough. Outside, the prevailing wind snuffled and whined around the ground-level eaves. He ate quickly, ravenously, drinking four cups of water with the meal. Halfway through, there was a machine-gun rapping at the door. Brown got up and let Zoltan in. The bird flew across the room and hunched moodily in the corner.

  “Musical fruit,” he muttered.

  Afterward, the gunslinger offered his tobacco.

  —Now. Now the questions will come.

  But Brown asked no questions. He smoked and looked at the dying embers of the fire. It was already noticeably cooler in the hovel.

  “Lead us not into temptation,” Zoltan said suddenly, apocalyptically.

  The gunslinger started as if he had been shot at. He was suddenly sure that it was an illusion, all of it (not a dream, no; an enchantment), that the man in black had spun a spell and was trying to tell him something in a maddeningly obtuse, symbolic way.

  “Have you been through Tull?” he asked suddenly.

  Brown nodded. “Coming here, and once to sell corn. It rained that year. Lasted maybe fifteen minutes. The ground just seemed to open and suck it up. An hour later it was just as white and dry as ever. But the corn—God, the corn. You could see it grow. That wasn’t so bad. But you could hear it, as if the rain had given it a mouth. It wasn’t a happy sound. It seemed to be sighing and groaning its way out of the earth.” He paused. “I had extra, so I took it and sold it. Pappa Doc said he would, but he would have cheated me. So I went.”

  “You don’t like town?”

  “No.”

  “I almost got killed there,” the gunslinger said abruptly.

  “That so?”

  “I killed a man that was touched by God,” the gunslinger said. “Only it wasn’t God. It was the man in black.”

  “He laid you a trap.”

  “Yes.”

  They looked at each other across the shadows, the moment taking on overtones of finality.

  —Now the questions will come.

  But Brown had nothing to say. His smoke was a smoldering roach, but when the gunslinger tapped his poke, Brown shook his head.

  Zoltan shifted restlessly, seemed about to speak, subsided.

  “May I tell you about it?” the gunslinger asked.

  “Sure.”

  The gunslinger searched for words to begin and found none. “I have to flow,” he said.

  Brown nodded. “The water does that. The corn, please?”

  “Sure.”

  He went up the stairs and out into the dark. The stars glittered overhead in a mad splash. The wind pulsed steadily. His urine arched out over the powdery cornfield in a wavering stream. The man in black had sent him here. Brown might even be the man in black himself. It might be—

  He shut the thoughts away. The only contingency he had not learned how to bear was the possibility of his own madness. He went back inside.

  “Have you decided if I’m an enchantment yet?” Brown asked, amused.

  The gunslinger paused on the tiny landing, startled. Then he came down slowly and sat.

  “I started to tell you about Tull.”

  “Is it growing?”

  “It’s dead,” the gunslinger said, and the words hung in the air.

  Brown nodded. “The desert. I think it may strangle everything eventually. Did you know that there was once a coach road across it?”

  The gunslinger closed his eyes. His mind whirled crazily.

  “You doped me,” he said thickly.

  “No. I’ve done nothing.”

  The gunslinger opened his eyes warily.

  “You won’t feel right about it unless I invite you,” Brown said. “And so I do. Will you tell me about Tull?”

  The gunslinger opened his mouth hesitantly and was surprised to find that this time the words were there. He began to speak in flat bursts that slowly spread into an even, slightly toneless narrative. The doped feeling left him, and he found himself oddly excited. He talked deep into the night. Brown did not interrupt at all. Neither did the bird.

  V

  He had bought the mule in Pricetown a week earlier, and when he reached Tull, it was still fresh. The sun had set an hour earlier, but the gunslinger had continued traveling, guided by the town glow in the sky, then by the uncannily clear notes of a honky-tonk piano playing “Hey Jude.” The road widened as it took on tributaries.

  The forests had been gone long now, replaced by the monotonous flat country: endless, desolate fields gone to timothy and low shrubs, shacks, eerie, deserted estates guarded by brooding, shadowed mansions where demons undeniably walked; leering, empty shanties where the people had either moved on or had been moved along, an occasional dweller’s hovel, given away by a single flickering point of light in the dark, or by sullen, inbred clans toiling silently in the fields by day. Corn was the main crop, but there were beans and also some peas. An occasional scrawny cow stared at him lumpishly from between peeled alder poles. Coaches had passed him four times, twice coming and twice going, nearly empty as they came up on him from behind and bypassed him and his mule, fuller as they headed back toward the forests of the north.

  It was ugly country. It had showered twice since he had left Pricetown, grudgingly both times. Even the timothy looked yellow and dispirited. Ugly country. He had seen no sign of the man in black. Perhaps he had taken a coach.

  The road made a bend, and beyond it the gunslinger clucked the mule to a stop and looked down at Tull. It was at the floor of a circular, bowl-shaped hollow, a shoddy jewel in a cheap setting. There were a number of lights, most of them clustered around the area of the music. There looked to be four streets, three running at right angles to the coach road, which was the main avenue of the town. Perhaps there would be a restaurant. He doubted it, but perhaps. He clucked at the mule.

  More houses sporadically lined the road now, most of them still deserted. He passed a tiny graveyard with moldy, leaning wooden slabs overgrown and choked by the rank devil-grass. Perhaps five hundred feet further on he passed a chewed sign which said: TULL.

  The paint was flaked almost to the point of illegibility. There was another further on, but the gunslinger was not able to read that one at all.

  A fool’s chorus of half-stoned voices was rising in the final protracted lyric of “Hey Jude”—“Naa naa-naa naa-na-na-na... hey, Jude...”—as he entered the town proper. It was a dead sound, like the wind in the hollow of a rotted tree. Only the prosaic thump and pound of the honky-tonk piano saved him from seriously wondering if the man in black might not have raised ghosts to inhabit a deserted town. He smiled a little at the thought.

  There were a few people on the streets, not many, but a few. Three ladies wearing black slacks and identical middy blouses passed by on the opposite boardwalk, not looking at him with pointed curiosity. Their faces seemed to swim above their all-but-invisible bodies like huge, pallid baseballs with eyes. A solemn old man with a straw hat perched firmly on top of his head watched him from the steps of a boarded-up grocery store. A scrawny tailor with a late customer paused to watch him by; he held up the lamp in his window for a better look. The gunslinger nodded. Neither the tailor nor his customer nodded back. He could feel their eyes resting heavily against the low-slung holsters that lay against his hips. A young boy, perhaps thirteen, and his girl crossed the street a block up, pausing imperceptibly. Their footfalls raised little hanging clouds of dust. A few of the streetside lamps worked, but their glass sides were cloudy with congealed oil. Most had been crashed out. There was a livery, probably depending on the coach line for its survival. Three boys were crouched silently around a marble ring drawn in the dust to one side of the barn’s gaping maw, smoking cornshuck cigarettes. They made long shadows in the yard.

  The gunslinger led his mule past them and looked into the dim depths of the barn. One lamp glowed sunkenly, and a shadow jumped and flickered as a gangling old man in bib overalls forked loose timothy hay into the hay loft wi
th huge, grunting swipes of his fork.

  “Hey!” the gunslinger called.

  The fork faltered and the hostler looked around waspishly. “Hey yourself!”

  “I got a mule here.”

  “Good for you.”

  The gunslinger flicked a heavy, unevenly milled gold piece into the semidark. It rang on the old, chaff-drifted boards and glittered.

  The hostler came forward, bent, picked it up, squinted at the gunslinger. His eyes dropped to the gunbelts and he nodded sourly.

  “How long you want him put up?”

  “A night. Maybe two. Maybe longer.”

  “I ain’t got no change for gold.”

  “I’m not asking for any.”

  “Blood money,” the hostler muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” The hostler caught the mule’s bridle and led him inside.

  “Rub him down!” The gunslinger called. The old man did not turn.

  The gunslinger walked out to the boys crouched around the marble ring. They had watched the entire exchange with contemptuous interest.

  “How is it hanging?” the gunslinger asked conversationally.

  No answer.

  “You dudes live in town?”

  No answer.

  One of the boys removed a crazily tilted twist of cornshuck from his mouth, grasped a green cat’s-eye marble, and squirted it into the dirt circle. It struck a croaker and knocked it outside. He picked up the cat’s-eye and prepared to shoot again.

  “There a restaurant in this town?” the gunslinger asked.

  One of them looked up, the youngest. There was a huge cold-sore at the corner of his mouth, but his eyes were still ingenuous. He looked at the gunslinger with hooded brimming wonder that was touching and frightening.

  “Might get a burger at Sheb’s.”

  “That the honky-tonk?”

  The boy nodded but didn’t speak. The eyes of his playmates had turned ugly and hostile.

  The gunslinger touched the brim of his hat. “I’m grateful. It’s good to know someone in this town is bright enough to talk.”

  He walked past, mounted the boardwalk, and started down toward Sheb’s, hearing the clear, contemptuous voice of one of the others, hardly more than a childish treble: “Weed-eater! How long you been screwin’ your sister, Charlie? Weed-eater!”

  There were three flaring kerosene lamps in front of Sheb’s, one to each side and one nailed above the drunk-hung batwing doors. The chorus of “Hey Jude” had petered out, and the piano was plinking some other old ballad. Voices murmured like broken threads. The gunslinger paused outside for a moment, looking in. Sawdust floor, spittoons by the tipsy-legged tables. A plank bar on sawhorses. A gummy mirror behind it, reflecting the piano player, who wore the inevitable gartered white shirt and who had the inevitable piano-stool slouch. The front of the piano had been removed so you could watch the wooden keys whonk up and down as the contraption was played. The bartender was a straw-haired woman wearing a dirty blue dress. One strap was held with a safety pin. There were perhaps six townies in the back of the room, juicing and playing Watch Me apathetically. Another half-dozen were grouped loosely about the piano. Four or five at the bar. And an old man with wild gray hair collapsed at a table by the doors. The gunslinger went in.

  Heads swiveled to look at him and his guns. There was a moment of near silence, except for the oblivious piano player, who continued to tinkle. Then the woman mopped at the bar, and things shifted back.

  “Watch me,” one of the players in the corner said and matched three hearts with four spades, emptying his hand. The one with the hearts swore, handed over his bet, and the next hand was dealt.

  The gunslinger approached the bar. “You got hamburger?” he asked.

  “Sure.” She looked him in the eye, and she might have been pretty when she started out, but now her face was lumpy and there was a livid scar corkscrewed across her forehead. She had powdered it heavily, but it called attention rather than camouflaging. “It’s dear, though.”

  “I figured. Gimme three burgers and a beer.”

  Again that subtle shift in tone. Three hamburgers. Mouths watered and tongues licked at saliva with slow lust. Three hamburgers.

  “That would go you five bucks. With the beer.”

  The gunslinger put a gold piece on the bar.

  Eyes followed it.

  There was a sullenly smoldering charcoal brazier behind the bar and to the left of the mirror. The woman disappeared into a small room behind it and returned with meat on a paper. She scrimped out three parties and put them on the fire. The smell that arose was maddening. The gunslinger stood with stolid indifference, only peripherally aware of the faltering piano, the slowing of the card game, the sidelong glances of the barflies.

  The man was halfway up behind him when the gunslinger saw him in the mirror. The man was almost completely bald, and his hand was wrapped around the haft of a gigantic hunting knife that was looped onto his belt like a holster.

  “Go sit down,” the gunslinger said quietly.

  The man stopped. His upper lip lifted unconsciously, like a dog’s, and there was a moment of silence. Then he went back to his table, and the atmosphere shifted back again.

  His beer came in a cracked glass schooner. “I ain’t got change for gold,” the woman said truculently.

  “Don’t expect any.”

  She nodded angrily, as if this show of wealth, even at her benefit, incensed her. But she took his gold, and a moment later the hamburgers came on a cloudy plate, still red around the edges.

  “Do you have salt?”

  She gave it to him from underneath the bar. “Bread?”

  “No.” He knew she was lying, but he didn’t push it. The bald man was staring at him with cyanosed eyes, his hands clenching and unclenching on the splintered and gouged surface of his table. His nostrils flared with pulsating regularity.

  The gunslinger began to eat steadily, almost blandly, chopping the meat apart and forking it into his mouth, trying not to think of what might have been added to it to cut the beef.

  He was almost through, ready to call for another beer and roll a smoke when the hand fell on his shoulders.

  He suddenly became aware that the room had gone silent again, and he tasted thick tension in the air. He turned around and stared into the face of the man who had been asleep by the door when he entered. It was a terrible face. The odor of the devil-grass was a rank miasma. The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes of those who see but do not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of the unconscious to confront sanity with the grinning, death’s-head rictus of utter lunacy.

  The woman behind the bar made a small moaning sound.

  The cracked lips writhed, lifted, revealing the green, mossy teeth, and the gunslinger thought: —He’s not even smoking it anymore. He’s chewing it. He’s really chewing it.

  And on the heels of that: —He’s a dead man. He should have been dead a year ago.

  And on the heels of that: —The man in black.

  They stared at each other, the gunslinger and the man who peered at the gunslinger from around the rim of madness.

  He spoke, and the gunslinger, dumbfounded, heard himself addressed in the High Speech:

  “The gold for a favor, gunslinger. Just one? For a pretty.”

  The High Speech. For a moment his mind refused to track it. It had been years—God!—centuries, millenniums; there was no more High Speech, he was the last, the last gunslinger. The others were—

  Numbed, he reached into his breast pocket and produced a gold piece. The split, scabbed hand reached for it, fondled it, held it up to reflect the greasy glare of the kerosene lamps. It threw off its proud civilized glow; golden, reddish, bloody.

  “Ahhhhhh...” An inarticulate sound of pleasure. The old man did a weaving turn and began moving back to his table, holding the coin at eye level, turning it, f
lashing it.

  The room was emptying rapidly, the batwings shuttling madly back and forth. The piano player closed the lid of his instrument with a bang and exited after the others in long, comic-opera strides.

  “Sheb!” The woman screamed after him, her voice an odd mixture of fear and shrewishness, “Sheb, you come back here! Goddammit!”

  The old man, meanwhile, had gone back to his table. He spun the gold piece on the gouged wood, and the dead-alive eyes followed it with empty fascination. He spun it a second time, a third, and his eyelids drooped. The fourth time, and his head settled to the wood before the coin stopped.

  “There,” she said softly, furiously. “You’ve driven out my trade. Are you satisfied?”

  “They’ll be back,” the gunslinger said.

  “Not tonight they won’t.”

  “Who is he?” He gestured at the weed-eater.

  “Go—” She completed the command by describing an impossible act of masturbation.

  “I have to know,” the gunslinger said patiently. “He—”

  “He talked to you funny,” she said. “Nort never talked like that in his life.”

  “I’m looking for a man. You would know him.”

  She stared at him, the anger dying. It was replaced with speculation, then with a high, wet gleam that he had seen before. The rickety building ticked thoughtfully to itself. A dog barked brayingly, far away. The gunslinger waited. She saw his knowledge and the gleam was replaced by hopelessness, by a dumb need that had no mouth.

  “You know my price,” she said.

  He looked at her steadily. The scar would not show in the dark. Her body was lean enough so the desert and grit and grind hadn’t been able to sag everything. And she’d once been pretty, maybe even beautiful. Not that it mattered. It would not have mattered if the grave-beetles had nested in the arid blackness of her womb. It had all been written.

  Her hands came up to her face and there was still some juice left in her— enough to weep.

  “Don’t look! You don’t have to look at me so mean!”

  “I’m sorry,” the gunslinger said. “I didn’t mean to be mean.”

  “None of you mean it!” She cried at him.