by Guran, Paula
The bartender asked the bounty killer where he’d captured the man, and the gunman shook his head. Said the raw-boned Mex was a dynamite man who’d been locked up for years, and just tonight the bounty killer had broken him out of Yuma Territorial. “His name is Indio. If he put his mind to it, he could blow the gates off hell with a pissed-on fuse and a quarter-stick sweating nitro.”
“The hell you say,” Rumson said.
“The hell I do,” said the bounty killer.
The bartender shrugged. “What can I get you?”
“Salt. Tequila. A guide.”
“A guide? Where to?”
“Vampire Lake.”
The bartender raised an eyebrow. “Most folks say there ain’t no place like that in the world. It’s just a legend, like the cave that’s supposed to hold it. Of course, other folks say differently.”
“That’s what I hear. Same way I hear there’s a kid in this town who’s paid hell’s own tab for a visit to that brimstone pit. Same way I hear there’s a saloon-keeper who keeps that kid locked up in a cage and charges folks a double eagle to hear his story.”
“Sounds to me like you’re talking about a man who’s got a piece of property and a piece of business. And that business would be the kid talking, not getting on a horse and riding to hell and gone out of here. A piece of business like you’re talking about would be worth a good deal more than the freight you’d pay to hear an evening’s worth of words.”
“Let me talk to the boy about that.”
“Let me see the color of your money.”
“I think you’ve seen plenty enough money out of this deal already. My business is with the boy, not the half-shingled bastard who keeps him locked up like a circus chimp.”
At the sound of those words, the bartender jerked in his boots. The two men stared at each other across the bar, nothing between them but dim quiet. Both of them watching and waiting for the thing that would happen next.
It was the dynamite man who broke the silence. “Amigo. If you’re so soft on men in cages, what about me? I’ve been in a cage up in Yuma for three damn years. Why don’t you crank a key in these locks and let me go, and we can call it square?”
“Shut up,” the bounty killer said. “You’re doing time for armed robbery and murder. Three years ago, you blew out a bank wall in Tucumcari and killed four men. I caught up to you in a whorehouse, stuck a pistol in your face, and the Territory of Arizona locked you in the poke. But I’m the one who put you in there, so I figure that gives me the right to take you out if I have the need. Once I’m done with you, maybe I’ll take you back.”
“You can get started on that little trip right now,” Rumson said. “Get the hell out of my bar, and take that Mexican trash with you.”
“Uh-uh. I don’t move until you bring me that boy.”
“You’ll move. And directly—”
Rumson reached under the bar for a sawed-off shotgun. Before his hands could make the trip the barkeep lost the equipment to say anything. The stranger’s pistol saw to that. It came out of its holster rattler-quick and sprayed Rumson’s head across the barroom wall. In the brief moment after the bullet did its work, what was left of Rumson’s skull looked like a diseased egg dropped by one sick chicken. By the time that bloody hunk of gristle hit the floor, the bounty killer’s black rattler of a pistol was back in its holster.
Rumson’s corpse followed his head, thudding against the bar, toppling bottles on its way to the floor. After that, the only sound was the barkeep’s blood dripping off the wall and ceiling, making scarlet divots in a patch of sawdust behind the bar. Leastways, that was the only sound until the real commotion started. Chair legs scraped hardwood as men scrambled for the batwing doors, but it was the click of pistol hammers in the hands of fools with more guts than brains that brought the bounty killer’s gun out of its holster again. When that happened there was more terror and tumult in Rumson’s Saloon than there were shadows, and the gleam of that black Colt springing through the darkness sent a stampede scrambling for the doorway as the first shots were fired. As the crowd scrambled more men filled their hands with pistols of their own, but none of those pistols would put a man in mind of a snake.
The bounty killer’s black rattler did its work. And when it was empty he ducked behind the bar and came up with Rumson’s shotgun. And when that was empty, it was all over.
Or more properly: It had just begun.
Four men remained alive in the bar. The bounty killer. The dynamite man on a chain. A dark-eyed blacksmith roughly the size of a barn door. And a calculating preacher who kept a running ledger on the flyleaf pages of the prayer book tucked inside a pocket of his claw-hammer coat.
“Where’s the boy?” the gunman asked.
“Probably out back eating a live chicken, feathers and all,” the preacher said. “That child is crazy, mister. Apaches captured him in the desert. God knows what lies he told those red bastards, but it put them in a temper. A few days later some scalphunters found the boy tied to a wagon wheel, his head cooking over a Mescalaro fire along with a couple of scrawny prairie hens. The birds had gone to cinders, but the kid had it worse. Half his face was burned off, and his brain was boiling in his skull like a Christmas pudding. Just because that misery scorched some nightmares in his head don’t make them true.”
“You talk but you don’t tell me anything I need to know.” The killer reloaded his pistol, slapped the cylinder closed, and gave it a spin for emphasis. “I asked one question. That question was: Where?”
“You don’t need gun for answer.” The blacksmith’s voice was heavy with an accent born in a German forest he’d never see again. “Boy is out back—in cage in barn, behind horse stalls. No rivets in cage; all welds. Three locks on it. Hasps as strong as bars. Double-thick, like plates.”
“How do you know all that?”
The blacksmith blinked. Words jumped from one tongue to another in his head, then made the trip through his lips. “I forge bars. I build locks and hasps. I make cage.”
The bounty killer cocked his black rattler.
“Let’s take a look,” he said.
The barn doors swung open. Boots whispered over the dirty hay that covered the barn floor. A lantern swung on a creaky handle in the preacher’s hand. It was close to midnight now, and the place was so dark it seemed the night had heaved in a dozen extra buckets of shadow.
The darkness lay heaviest in a patch transfixed by iron bars near the back corner of the barn. “Give me that lantern,” the bounty killer said. Light played across the black bars as he took it from the preacher, and light painted the occupant along with the contents of the cage—a scuffed plate that didn’t get used much and a few tattered books that did: Idylls of the King, The Thousand and One Nights, and a dime novel about Billy the Kid.
“Look at that damned animal,” the preacher said. “Face like a scorched biscuit. The brain of a kicked chicken. Stinks like an Arizona outhouse in August.”
Everyone squinted in the lantern’s glow. Only the blacksmith knew better than to look. He stared down at his mule-eared boots. But the dynamite man didn’t know better. He took a good long look. Then he turned his head and retched up his supper.
The bounty killer stared through the bars without saying a word. He fished the dead bartender’s key ring from his pocket. A moment later he went to work with three of the keys, slipping padlocks from hasps, opening the door.
Part Two: The Town
“Come out of there,” the bounty killer said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I picked up my chicken. Henrietta flapped some, shedding a few of the feathers I hadn’t plucked. I petted her and told her to hush, but she flapped her naked wings and squawked up a storm.
“Looks like we interrupted his supper,” the preacher said.
I glared at him and didn’t say a word, though there were plenty inside me I could have put to work. Instead I held Henrietta close, stretched myself in the lantern glow, and watched my
shadow cast a path that led straight to the door.
We stood outside around an empty barrel, the lantern set on top of it. The bounty killer pulled a bank book from his pocket. “You get me to Vampire Lake, what’s in this book is yours. It amounts to twenty years of killing and twenty years of bounties. The four of you get back alive, you can split it four ways.” With that, he slapped the book on the barrelhead next to the lantern so we could get a look at it.
The blacksmith was confused. “This is book. Just paper.”
“These days money is just paper, too, amigo,” Indio said. “Banks are full of it, and one page from a book like this can bring many dollars. What our friend here collected for me and my gang alone would keep us in whores for a year.”
“But I am blacksmith. Not killer.”
“I take care of that job,” the bounty killer said. “But there are other jobs that need doing. The kid here, he’s our guide. He’ll take us through the desert, find that cave, lead us down to the underground lake where those dead things roost. And Indio will take care of any trouble we run into along the way that can be handled with dynamite.”
The big man said it again: “But I am blacksmith.”
“Yeah. That’s what you’ve got inside you, but it’s bundled up in one hell of a package. Where we’re going, I need a man who tops a couple hundred pounds and doesn’t mind the scorch of hot coals. You’re elected.”
“Those three I understand.” The preacher picked up the bank book and stared hard at the balance. “You need yourself a birddog, you’ve got a biscuit-faced geek uglier than Satan’s own bitch. You think you’re going to dynamite the gates of hell, you want the Mex along. The other one is a freight train on legs and too stupid to think for himself. But what about me? Why do you want a preacher along?”
“That’s a lot of hard tongue for a man who carries a Bible,” the bounty killer said.
“Fair enough . . . but right now I’m not behind a pulpit, friend. I’m doing business, and business calls for straight tongue. So what is it? What do you want from me? Is there something down in that devil’s shithole that you want prayed to death?”
The gunslinger didn’t blink.
“It’s simple. I want words said over anything I kill tonight. The way I see it, you may not be the best man for the job, but you’re the only one around tonight.”
The preacher bit off a hard laugh. “Sometimes finding work is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. And as far as words go, no one said a single damn one over those poor bastards you slaughtered back in the saloon.”
“We’re going to fix that right now.”
“Well, we can talk about it. You killed a lot of men back there. Generally my fees for funeral services are one per customer. And since this piece of business doesn’t have anything to do with going down in a cave, it’s got to be a separate deal—”
“I already told you the deal.” The bounty killer snatched the bank book out of the preacher’s hand and grabbed him by the collar. The fuss the preacher put up did not last long, not after a couple hard slaps put the button to his lip.
We went back to the bar. Except for the dead men, it was empty. Even the whores were gone. God knows where the ladies had hustled off to, but they’d made themselves scarce after the gunfight.
The blacksmith and the bounty killer took a few doors off their hinges in the whores’ rooms upstairs. They placed the doors flat, each one resting between a couple of chairs, and they laid the dead men on top of them. They crossed the corpses’ arms over their chests—the ones who had two arms, anyway. One of the men who’d been sprayed with Rumson’s sawed-off street howitzer was missing a wing. He lay there just as still as the others, the stiffening fingers of his remaining hand embracing the ruined socket just north of his heart. Rumson’s headless corpse lay next to him; the leavings of his skull were in a canvas bag at his feet.
Once the dead were settled, the preacher said his piece. It was a short piece, and bereft of flowers. That was just fine with me. I was not much on flowers. As it turned out, the preacher was not much on words . . . especially when payday was a ways off.
When the praying was over, he sidled past the dynamite man.
A little blood trickled from the preacher’s lip, and he wiped it away.
“He’s one dirty bastard we’re working for,” he said. “But that was money in the bank.”
The blacksmith did most of the grunt work. He harnessed a team of swaybacks to a wagon while Indio and the preacher looted the general store for supplies. I tipped a dude’s beaver-skinned bowler out of a hatbox and nestled Henrietta inside it, then helped myself to a new set of clothes. It had been a while since I’d had one. I was almost seventeen, and had been wearing the set I had on for something like two years. They were tight and stiff with the sweat of misery. The preacher watched me as I stripped out of them.
“Jesus, you’re ugly. You look worse than that half-plucked chicken.”
“I don’t have to speak to you,” I said.
“Tell the truth. When we found you in that cage, you were ready to eat that chicken raw. You’re probably still going to eat it as soon as you get a chance. Why else would you pluck the damn bird, anyway?”
“I keep Henrietta’s wings plucked so she won’t get away. She’s not half-grown, even. She needs me to keep her warm. And that man with the gun is right. You don’t talk like a preacher.”
The man in black laughed. “Hell, I talk the way I please when there’s not a collection plate around. And as for pets, you want one, get a dog. You want victuals, get a chicken. That’s what god intended, son . . . unless you’re a damn heathen Apache that’ll eat both and follow the meal with a little skin jerky baked off a white boy’s face for dessert.”
I ignored him. After I had dressed, I helped myself to a wide-brimmed hat to shadow my scars. That was when I heard the others chattering over the events in Rumson’s saloon. I closed my eyes and listened, saw everything happen in my head. It was just the way I pictured things when I read a book. When the men finished the story, the blacksmith and I loaded up the supplies in the wagon.
While I worked, I added pieces of the story to the things I’d already learned about the men. And I’ll admit it. I thought about money while I did that. I thought about freedom, too. A place where I could be by myself, except for Henrietta and maybe some old tomcat. It’d be a place where I wouldn’t have to tell that story about the cave, or have anyone look at me at all if I didn’t want them to. Maybe it’d be a place where I could tell other stories, write them down and send them off to folks who would print them between hard covers. They’d send me money, and I’d write more when I wanted to. It seemed like that would be a square deal, and a lot better than the one I’d had at Rumson’s place.
I thought about it long and hard.
Pretty soon I’d made a decision.
A smart person might risk just about anything for a setup like that.
Even a return trip to hell.
Soon the wagon was loaded, and that put the end to my thoughts. It was time to move on. The preacher and Indio went off somewhere and came back with a crate of dynamite. After the murders in Rumson’s saloon, it was easy pickings in town tonight. We left the general store with the door wide open. It didn’t matter. Sheriff Needham was nowhere in sight. I didn’t know where the hard-eyed little lawdog and his deputy had got to, but whether they had made the trip out of luck or fear I figured they were smart to be clear of things this night.
We returned to the bar to get the bounty killer. He’d remained with the dead men, knowing there was no worry about any of us running off now that the numbers from his bank book were dancing in our heads. The desert night was cold, wind blowing down from the mountain. Dust devils swirled around us, erasing the footsteps of the men who lay dead in Rumson’s bar. It was like the night wanted to clear off the last trace of them. The moon was full up by then, and it hung low in the sky, and light spilled from it like an Apache buck’s kn
ife had slit it straight across and turned all that bleeding white loose.
I sat in the wagon with the reins in my hands. Henrietta was asleep in the hatbox at my side. The other men were on horseback. We heard the bounty killer coughing inside Rumson’s place as he walked from dead man to dead man, not getting too close to any of them, staring down at each one. Between coughs, he tried to work words through his lips. The batwings creaked in the wind, swinging in and out, and the gunman seemed to be strangling on those words, and through the gap I saw him go down on his knees as quick as if someone had clubbed him with an ax-handle.
He started to retch, and we heard a thick splatter slap the floorboards.
“The bastard gunned those men down like dogs,” the preacher said. “You’d think he’d have the nerve to face them dead.”
“Nerve ain’t his problem,” Indio said. “He’s got plenty of nerve.”
I wondered about that as I watched the bounty killer there in the shadows. His guts bucked him something awful. The sound was horrible, like something alive trying to eat its way out of him. We all looked away.
I closed my eyes. The night was black, but the only color in my head was red. It painted the barroom floor and the bounty killer’s lips and the things I saw. They were things that had happened in the night, some that I’d seen and some that I hadn’t, but all of them were broiling in my thoughts nonetheless. The bloodstained harmonica on the bar. The murders in the barroom. Rumson’s head toppling off his shoulders, kicking up a sawdust cloud as it hit the floor. I saw all that like the blood on King Arthur’s sword in the tales I read, and Aladdin’s scimitar flashing through Arabian shadows, and Billy the Kid blasting a man’s guts to ribbons with a shotgun. Everything I saw played to the sound of a harmonica scrabbling over the ribs of the night, and gunshots from a black rattler of a pistol, and whispered voices in a general store at midnight. All of it was red, and it went down my spine like a bucket of ice, and it made me sit up straight on that wagon box with my breath trapped in my throat.