* A Bucketful Of Babble And Bellsong *
Jonah lay in a cradle of bouncing darkness. The voice of God and the burning sun kept on shouting down in his ears like a howling boom of long caverned thunder.
Death was loud, he guessed.
Still, if this was dead it wasn’t too bad. It was no worse than running bare-naked through a Mexican bordello, running from a three hundred pound horny big assed pink-skirted muleskinner he-she, who went by the name of Panchita.
He’d tried that once.
Bump, bump, bump.
Jonah smelled darkness, and then he felt light upon his cheekbones.
In his mind’s eye he saw a burning barbed wire staircase surrounded by a pack of screaming angels. He couldn’t tell for certain if it was his imagination, or if it was real.
He’d never been dead before.
He rode the staircase high and higher, feeling that peculiar forward rolling bounce motion. It didn’t feel like a horse. It felt more like a rocking chair mixed with a slow rolling earthquake, and him tucked between the huge bony unwiped ass petals of a two hundred year-old sporting woman.
It must be the chariot of God, he decided, taking him home to Heaven, only God’s chariot sorely needed a wash.
And then Jonah saw a Heaven.
Heaven had a great pearly gate, all gleaming bone white. And beyond it a city of light and singing and dancehall girls with legs that never quite met. There were acres of sunshine and uncorked bottles, glinting in a tangy sex-smelling breeze. He saw pigs, skewered over open pits of roasting honey. Buckets of twenty-dollar gold pieces falling from the crotches of high-kicking whoretrees.
In the distance he saw a great spinning wheel, turning round and round turning, with all the souls in Heaven strapped to it. Rolling them down and raising them up. Raising all them sinners into the sweet perfumed clouds of Heaven, rolling them back down into the flaming pits of hellfire and wanted posters, and then up again into the sweet perfume. Giving them a taste of both worlds. Trying to be fair and teasing, all in one shot.
And there was Saint Peter, standing at the gate and carrying a big old flaming sword for all those trespassers who needed forgiving.
Saint Peter was wearing a tarnished barbwire shirt of eyes and mouths woven together. All those eyes, always upon you. Judging you, while those mouths kept on talking in a thousand different tongues. All that tonguemeat clanging away like a bucket full of babble and bellsong.
“Take. Eat,” St. Peter said, handing Jonah a chunk of something too dark and burning to see for sure.
He shoved it closer.
“Take, eat...”
Jonah opened wide and took it.
Swallowed it down.
Man, oh manna, it tasted just like dirt.
* The World’s Ugliest Mule *
There was nothing in the world that tasted like Texas dirt. It has got a certain flavor to it, like all the Texans in the world had pissed on it and sweated on it and cursed it out bitterly before they bled their last drop of living down onto and into its fine, thirsty substance.
Jonah sat up, spitting out the taste of bitter sand. He tried to hack it out, but coughing seemed hard, like he hadn’t packed any wind behind it.
“Tastes good don’t it?” the old man said. “That’s the pizon thorn, eating through what’s left of your blood.”
Jonah looked up, as best as he could. It looked like he was in some kind of a tunnel. Dark, only he could see just fine. Stooped over him was the old man he’d last seen talking out of the desert floor.
And above that was a great misshapen shape. It looked like a horse crossed with a hillock and a hole. First that big ugly head, swinging down like a leper’s cock. Then those lips puffed out and flapping like the ugliest whore in San Francisco - chewing on something that might have been meat.
“Damn,” Jonah swore.
The beast’s neck was as long as a tree limb, hung with mossy fur dangling down like an old man’s beard. The back was the worst of all. Two big tumorous humps poked up high and obscene, like the Goddamn thing’s backbone was infested with hill termites.
“That’s Two Bump,” the old man said. “You can thank him nice for the ride he gave you, if you got an ounce of politetitude in your soul.”
Jonah shook his head in disbelief.
“That’s got to be the ugliest looking mule I’ve ever seen,” Jonah said. “What the hell is wrong with its back?”
The old man spat his undisguised contempt into the dirt.
“It ain’t a mule. It’s a camel. A bactrian camel, two-humped, from the rolling thunder steppes of Central Asia. Home of the Tartars. Genghis Khan and all his pillaging steerboys. I stole him from the army, some time back. They’d tried their hand at camel herding, but the damn beasts are too smart to serve in any army. Old Two Bump, he don’t even like the desert. His feet are too darned soft.”
Jonah looked up at the old man.
He could see all of him now. A gnarly bowlegged old cuss, with more creases and wrinkles than a crumpled up lizard hide. A tilt to his head, like his neck had been broke and never set back right. He was packing a whole lot of iron. A pair of twin singleshot caliber .50’s in his belt. A big old knife that might have called itself a sword without telling much of a lie. Tucked and tied under his arm was a funny looking seven-barreled contraption that looked like something you’d shoot a mountain with.
Jonah opened his eyes wide with respect. If that trumped up blunderbuss could shoot anywhere near straight, the thing must have been hellishly dangerous. He could have used it when he was trying to pick that cave booger off.
Wait a minute…
Thoughts started churning.
“Dangerous looking thing isn’t it?” the old cuss said, pointing at the blunderbuss. “This here is what you call a Nock Volley Gun.”
He’d been hit hadn’t he?
“I used to have a Springfield besides this, until that bastard Leadbetter took it off my dead body.”
Dead?
“I took this one back from one of his steerboys, but I haven’t managed to catch up with Leadbetter, yet.”
He’d been hit.
Jonah was certain of it.
The old man kept on talking.
“Seven barrels, .52 caliber loaded buck and ball.”
Hit in the back? No, the head.
“Takes forever to load and it kicks like a wasp stung mule; but I never knowed a man to die from too much gun, unless he was standing on the wrong end of things.”
He paused, looking thoughtful and ugly at the same time.
“Excepting one, maybe.”
Jonah wasn’t listening. He was too busy remembering.
He remembered the bright lights flashing. He remembered that loud kick in the back of his skull. The pasty red white rain scattering before his eyeballs before everything all went black.
“About the only way I can safely fire it is off the back of Two Bump,” the old man went on. “Are you listening?”
Jonah opened his mouth.
He let the words fall out.
“I’m dead, ain’t I?”
“Of course you are. And I brought you back.”
Shit.
It hit Jonah like a brick thrown by God.
He was dead.
Damn.
It was too much to swallow.
Damn.
The world swung around like a drunken hangman’s noose.
Everything got fogged in and dizzy.
Jonah shook his head to clear it of the fog. The sky started spinning and shooting past faster than corn fed, castor oiled shit.
“Easy boy,” the old man warned. “You’ve had half your skull blown off. Don’t be shaking the half that’s left too darned fervently, or you’re apt to forget what little bit of manners you got left.”
Jonah reached back and touched the top of his skull. It felt sticky and wet, like a bowl of sogged-out oatmeal.
“Sweet Jes...” he began to say, and then as his fingers
touched deeper down into the wet muck of what was left of his brains. And then he couldn’t say much at all. His mouth just forgot to keep moving. It just hung there, like a chunk of fresh dropped gallow meat.
“Stop digging at that,” the old man warned. “You ain’t got that much sense left in you. You didn’t have that much to start with, I’ll warrant.”
He grabbed Jonah’s hand and held it hard.
The carousel slowly spun down to a halt.
“Wha-?” Jonah started to say, only the word got stuck trying to come out.
Stuck so hard he had to try again.
“Warned you,” the old man said. “You keep rooting, you’ll forget how to make words. Then you’ll be good for nothing but eating, or being et’. Might as well be a crawler, then.”
The feeling was worse than a whiskey hangover. Like his brain was yelling at his mouth to speak, only his mouth had been struck stone deaf. Jonah concentrated. He opened his mouth carefully, making the tongue move and the wind talk for him. Only he didn’t seem to be breathing all that much. He had to force it out, like his lungs had forgotten how.
“It happened?” he asked slowly.
“What happened? You were shot, deader than tumbled down tombstones,” the old man cheerfully assured him. “Old Leadbetter seen to that, you bet. But I brought you back, slick as a tin bugler’s snot whistle.”
Back? Dead? What was all this horseshit?
He still couldn’t believe it.
“And you ain’t even thanked me, once. Don’t even know my name, do you? You even think of asking? What kind of manners did they hand out to you back when you was alive, younker?”
Jonah kept trying to pull it all together.
“Who, what, are you?” The words were sticking, like an unclean gun.
“Zacheus Boonehorn Tides, at your service and command with just a half dozen provisos, reservations, and misguided doubts. You got a name, or will you mind answering to ‘Hey, you, bub?’”
Jonah thought about it for a moment. He decided the old man was talking sense, even if it sounded crazy. At least his knee didn't hurt any longer.
“Jonah, I think," He still wasn't sure what was real and what wasn't, but he'd ride along as best he could until he fell the hell on off. "Jonah Walker.”
“Walker, eh? Suits. Well Walker, get walking, and duck your head when lean comes to stoop. It gets tight down here in the tunnels. One good scrape of that skull will take out half of your remaining memorabilia, and I’ll have to diaper you up and leave you for the crawlers.”
“Crawlers?”
Zacheus pointed upwards.
“Them upstairs. Can’t you hear them?”
Jonah did his best to listen – which wasn’t easy, given the sandstorm of bone dust and confusion that was blowing between his ears. Then he heard it.
A low scuttling, like rats in the walls. A thirsty sound. Thirsty and hungry. And moans. Low and long and sorrowful. Aching with the hunger of pure regret. All the raining tears in Heaven couldn’t weep down hard enough.
He shivered.
“How’s he make it down here?” Jonah asked, pointing at Two Bump, trying to change the topic.
“I taught him to kneel.”
“He listens to you?”
“Why not? I talked to him.”
“You speak camel?”
Zacheus snorted.
“You speak anything, if you live with it long enough. Even them,” he nodded up towards the sound of the crawlers. “Come on then. No time to be lingering here. I got to get us down to the camphole and get us something to eat. You must be getting hungry by now, I sure as hell am.”
Jonah was surprised to hear his belly growling in agreement. Surprised, because he didn’t think the dead would need to eat.
“What do we eat?” he asked. “Beans?”
Zacheus snorted.
He turned and fixed Jonah with one tilted slice of a stare.
He said one word.
Four little letters, freighted heavy as a wagonload of sin.
He said--“Meat.”
And suddenly, Jonah was hungry.
* You Might As Well Whistle For The Wind *
The crawlers were always hungry.
They had torn the horse’s corpse down like a Christmas turkey. They didn’t mind the taste of the gunpowder one bit. They were way past that kind of sissified hunger. The crawlers were empty. Like maggots on legs, nothing but a gullet and a want as long as a century of forever.
They scrambled over the carcass, tearing great chunks of horsemeat from the bones. When the meat was gone they cracked the bones and swizzled out the marrow. When the marrow was gone they scraped and niggled upon the bones like a legion of religious termites. When the bone was gone they sucked at the sand, drawing at the memory of blood. They even found morsels of unholy nourishment in the fly ridden manure of the horse’s last crap. Finally they settled upon the tantalizing aftertaste in the hollow memory of the horse’s cast shadow.
The crawlers were men, once, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that the crawlers remembered what they used to be. They remembered how they’d walked and drank and breathed and whored and fought and died. They remembered the taste of sunshine, the smell of an unmade bed and the woman tossed within. The reek of tobacco, and the feel of their legs moving beneath road stiff deer hide. They remembered it all, and longed for it, and that only added a painful savor to their cravings.
It was a lesson as old as time. The thorn sticks it out, long after the rose has faded to dust. The memory of the knife is a hell of a lot worse than the actual cut. Scars never really heal.
Leadbetter joined the crawlers, half way through the horse. He rode up on his bone ragged carrion stallion, and clambered carefully down. It wouldn’t do to jump. If he broke something off, the crawlers would eat him up just as quick as anything else.
He ate his fill. A bit of leg muscle. An ear. He even got a chunk of the liver. It tasted ripe and purple. Only none of the horse brains. They were long gone. Too bad. They were the best parts.
His horse grazed at a hoof he’d tossed it, pushing its bony snout deep down into the hollow of the socket, crunching and sucking at what good it could get from the horny bit of overgrown toenail.
Leadbetter kept one careful eye peeled, in case the crawlers got ideas about his horse. It was worn down to nothing, and he’d probably eat it before the month was out, but right now it was a whole lot better than riding nothing but his feet.
He rooted face deep in meat. When he was done, he tipped his hat back and swiped at his cheeks. He licked his fingers fastidiously. He shoved them into his mouth and whistled.
“Come on, you dead bastards. Time for home. The Moon Man’s waiting to tuck you into bed.”
They lined up obediently.
He counted them off.
Shit.
He was missing three, unless he’d forgot how to count.
“Come on, you bastards! All of you.”
His words hung in the still desert air like the sucked out carcasses of flies dangling in a hungry spider’s web.
He yelled again – trying to call the lost ones home.
He whistled until another tooth fell out.
He might well have been whistling for the wind. Nothing was listening. Nothing heard.
And one of what he was whistling for hadn’t any ears to hear him with.
* No Ears *
The headless crawler, the one that Leadbetter had shot, rooted blindly about, using the stump of his decapitation like a plow. It made kind of a weird looking picture. Like a man who thought he was an ostrich, leaned over like an upside down U, pushing his head along underneath the dirt.
Only there wasn’t any head. Just the blasted off stump of a neck, sucking and puckering at the dirt like a sandified mud leech. The two others, well they’d been followers in life, and far as their risen up brains could muster - this one’s bent over behind was as good enough compass as any. The decapitated crawle
r sucked and sniffed and scoured the sand clean, and they poked along behind him, a couple of stragglers hoping for leftovers.
Then No Ears body found the oatmealed remnants of Jonah’s blasted brain, the bits of skull bone scattered like candy freckles on a double frosted cake. He found the tiny washed out track of dusty blood that Jonah had trailed snail-like behind him as Zacheus dragged him into the hidden burrow.
Then he found the rock, covering the trapdoor into the tunnels below. He might have snout crawled over it a thousand times, save for the straggle of brain that had come unglued when Zacheus had dragged Jonah down under.
He tasted that bit of brain and just for a half a half instant he remembered how to think.
Something good went down that hole.
No Ears body dug, like a famished grizzly bear rooting for grubs, dragging out bits of rotted skin and nails and sucking them up whole as he worked what was left of his fingers deep beneath the hidden door. The others gave what help they could. When they finally got the trapdoor open, they clambered inside. They were used to tunnels, used to being down in the dirt.
They followed No Ears body, as he ostrich sucked his way down the tunnel, pausing only to chew up a tangy souvenir that Two Bump had left on the tunnel floor.
And behind this procession, sucking and chewing its way along the tunnel like an overgrown pillbug, came No Ears head.
Crawling on its lips, sucking and chewing like an ugly worm from a pile of ugly dirt.
It was all he could do, so he did it.
He headed after the only home he ever knew.
The shoulders that had carried him for so many years.
Inch by stubborn inch, No Ears followed himself down deeper into the tunnel.
* Deader Than A Beaver Hat *
Jonah followed Zacheus and Two Bump down a long winding tunnel that didn’t seem to have an end.
And sure enough, just like Zacheus promised, the camel crawled. It was the damnedest thing Jonah ever saw. This big two bumped beast, kneeling and shuffling along like the world’s ugliest altar boy.
Steve Vernon Special Edition Gift Pack, Vol 1 Page 3