The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl

by Tim Pratt

  “Well, yes,” he said. “If I wanted a real gun I wouldn’t buy a Colt forty-five Peacemaker anyway. They were reliable enough for their time, but I’d probably go for a Desert Eagle or—”

  “A Colt forty-five?” she said, intrigued. That was the gun Rangergirl used, and, in a way, the gun the Outlaw used, too, though his were called Warmakers.

  “Wyatt Earp style,” the man said. “With the extra-long barrel for increased accuracy.”

  “That’s apocryphal,” Marzi said. “He probably didn’t really have guns like that.”

  “But it’s a good story,” the man said. “Don’t miss the point.” His expression was deeply serious, face creased like an old leather satchel.

  Marzi grinned. “I don’t guess you have another one, do you? They’re better in pairs.”

  “Alas, times are not what they once were, and I only have the one. Do you want it, or not?”

  “How much?”

  The man looked at the sky thoughtfully, his eyes a placid ocean blue. “Three dollars and eighty-eight cents,” he said finally.

  Marzi took a five from her pocket. “Here you go.”

  “We regret that we cannot provide change,” he said.

  “I figured as much. Call it a tip.”

  “No, no, you have to get your full value. I’ll throw in the caps. The package isn’t even opened.” He dug around in his satchel some more until he retrieved a battered yellow cardboard box. A grinning cartoon cowboy beamed at Marzi from the package, holding up a pair of six-shooters. “200 Shots!” the lettering proclaimed.

  Marzi took the package, pleased.

  “Don’t point that at anybody,” the man said. “Unless you mean to use it.”

  “Thanks for this,” Marzi said.

  “You’d better put it out of sight,” he said. “Toy guns these days are all bright yellow and fake-looking. If the cops see you with that, they might not know it’s a toy. Cops in this town, bang-bang, talk to you later, you know?”

  Marzi nodded. “You know, I always wondered—”

  “Why criminals don’t paint their Uzis fluorescent orange and carry them down the street right in the open? Yeah, I’ve wondered that, too. There’s just not a lot of whimsy in the world when it comes to guns. Maybe that’s for the best.”

  “Yeah,” Marzi said, and put the gun and the caps into her bag. Hell, it probably was an antique—she’d probably just gotten it for a steal. “Take it easy.”

  “Happy trails,” the vendor said.

  Marzi continued on her way, humming. A little while ago she was in her house, terrified to even go outside . . . but things hadn’t been so bad since then, once she actually got out. Hendrix had acted like a human being, and now she had a cool new toy. Denis and his crazy girlfriend had rattled her, that was for sure, and seeing Daniel die had shaken her profoundly, but those things were explicable. Stress, not enough sleep, overwork; surely that accounted for the things she’d seen, the weird visions. Her mind didn’t feel close to any breaking point at all, right now. She felt basically sound, even potentially happy.

  Today she’d rest and follow her whims, she decided. No work, and no drawing unless she wanted to. She’d get lunch somewhere, then see where the afternoon took her—the park, the beach, the bookstores, wherever. She wouldn’t think about Beej, or Denis, or dead guys, or anything. No vultures, no voices from Neptune’s Kingdom, nothing bad. Just peace. Maybe she’d hook up with Lindsay or Jonathan at some point. Marzi whistled, and tapped her fingers against her bag in time, feeling the smooth contours of the gun beneath her touch.

  She ambled toward the Saturn Café, the all-night vegetarian diner with the tattoo-themed décor, walls boldly painted with skulls, mermaids, dice, hearts, and devils. The place was barely inhabited at this hour, only a few of the booths along the curving walls occupied. Jonathan sat at one of the tables, a cup of coffee and a mostly demolished plate of huevos rancheros pushed off to the side. He was reading something intently—poring over it, actually. “Jonathan,” she said.

  He looked up, for a moment seeming not even to see her, an oddly wonderful faraway look in his eyes. Then he focused, smiled, and said, “Hey, you. Have a seat.”

  She slid into the booth. The tables in Saturn were all uniquely decorated, and this one had old pulp paperback covers underneath a glass top: women in red dresses, menaced by shadows; men in spacesuits; elaborate UFOs; even a few gunfighters. Then she saw what Jonathan was reading, the pages before him, the stack beside him on his seat: what looked to be the entire run of The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. “Aw, crap. You don’t want to read those things, they’ll rot your brain.”

  Jonathan closed the cover on the issue he was reading—number eight, the cover depicting a group of dusty townspeople running a monstrously muscled creature out of town on a rail. “Is that what they’re doing to my brain? It felt nicer than that. Lindsay loaned me the whole run. They’re wonderful.”

  Marzi ducked her head and looked around for a waitress. “Yeah, well. It’s what I do. I’m just lucky they get published. Tropism Comics doesn’t pay much, and the distribution could be better, but I’ve got creative control.”

  A waitress came over—she had a tattoo of a bass clef on her left cheek, and her hair was shockingly pink—and took Marzi’s order, cheese fries and a cup of French onion soup, and coffee, of course. “Help yourself to the fries,” she said, “they always give me a thousand more than I can eat.”

  “Thanks.” They both reached for the fries, their hands brushing, and Marzi felt that half-strange, half-familiar tingle that comes from touching someone you might perhaps be attracted to for the first time. When she glanced up at him he was glancing at her, too. They looked away, each taking a cheese-dripping fry, neither one saying anything. Such a little romantic-comedy sort of moment, but there it was, and Marzi had to admit that the reason it worked in the movies was because you felt it in life sometimes too, though the consequences never worked out as neatly as they did on screen.

  Jonathan picked up the stack of comics and put them on the table, thumbing through the issues. Once the waitress was gone he said, “I think my favorite is the first one. Not that the other issues aren’t good—they are—but you do such a great job introducing Rangergirl, showing her punk sensibility, and her reaction to finding the door in the wall of her apartment. . . . It’s all in the art, in the linework and the shading. It’s remarkable. You do all this yourself?”

  Marzi shrugged. “Lindsay usually helps with the lettering. She’s got a steady hand. She won’t let me credit her, though. Says it’s my party, and she doesn’t want people to think she deserves credit for anything, not even for putting the words in people’s balloons. It was her idea to put those vicious little serifs on all the words the Outlaw speaks, that jagged sort of lightning-bolt quality.”

  “It’s a nice touch,” Jonathan said. “But what I love most is the cover for issue number one.” He picked through the stack of comics until he found the first one, placing it in the middle of the table, as if to admire it better.

  That cover was the image that started the comic, for Marzi, that made a bunch of free-floating ideas solidify into something tangible, something she could imagine transferring from her mind to paper. The cover depicted Rangergirl, short-haired, wearing a skirt, standing in her apartment, in front of an open door. On the left of the door stood a table, with a vase and a very Georgia O’Keeffe flower set upon it. Rangergirl stood facing the door, a little off to one side, and through the door a line of storefronts stretched, with hitching posts in front—a scene familiar to anyone who’d ever seen a Western, a look down the length of Main Street. Down at the far end of the street, the Outlaw stood, a black figure, really just a silhouette of a hat, a long duster, and boots. The classic position for a showdown, hero and villain facing off on a dusty street. Marzi had done her best to infuse the Outlaw with menace, to make him a blot that sucked up light. Some days, she thought she’d succeeded. Other days, she thought he was
just a blot.

  “I like the issues where Rangergirl goes back and forth from one world to the next,” Jonathan said. “Where we see her trying to hold down her job on one page, and on the next page she’s rescuing a wagon train from a spine-cat. The juxtaposition works well, and the strain on her is so clear. You can tell sometimes she’d ditch it all if she could, just have a normal life, but she can’t—because she opened the door.”

  “It’s her responsibility,” Marzi said, and the words felt strange in her mouth, both true and unwelcome. “She can’t stop. There’s too much depending on her.”

  “Yes. And you’re so good at piling on the details,” Jonathan said. His voice had the same liveliness she’d noticed when he talked about Garamond Ray’s work. “Like the town where the people have the heads of dogs, and then you work in all that stuff about Egyptian mythology, with the jackal-headed god of the underworld. I love your notion that all deserts are one desert, that Rangergirl might just as easily encounter Bedouins as Navajo Indians, that she could find a ghost town or a dead pharaoh’s counting house beyond the next gully or dune. And the rattlesnake sphinx is remarkable. I can’t wait to see how that turns out.”

  She frowned. “The rattlesnake sphinx is in the last issue,” she said. “I thought you were only on number eight?”

  “I’m on number eight the second time through. I read them all once for the story, and the art. I’m reading it again to see what I missed.” Jonathan tapped the page in front of him. “Like this, when the sea monster’s fin surfaces from the rain barrel, I missed that the first time, so it was a surprise when the townspeople found out that was what had been killing all the cattle.”

  “There was an actual sea monster,” Marzi said. “It didn’t live in a rain barrel, and it didn’t eat anyone, but a sea serpent was caught, at Newport Beach. It was over thirty feet long. They say another one, ten times as long, got away. There’s a photograph of the dead serpent, with people lined up along its length to provide scale. It looks like a giant eel. The body disappeared, though. A lot of the stuff in the comic is based on history, actually. I twist it out of true, but the seed is often historical. Charles Hatfield was a real rainmaker, and that stuff about Pancho Villa’s head is all true, and—”

  “And Aaron Burr,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know much about him, except that he shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel.”

  “Burr was nearly convicted of treason. There’s evidence that he planned to found his own empire in the West, using a cache of stolen gold to finance the economy. That didn’t work out for him, in the real world. But in my story, Burr succeeded in founding that empire, and he rules the land beyond the Western Door.”

  “But the Outlaw is really the one in charge.”

  “No,” Marzi said. “Burr is a bad guy, but he’s a builder. He builds towns, empires, alliances; all for his own gain, never for a good reason, but still. The Outlaw doesn’t build. He tears things down. He’s an earthquake wearing boots.”

  Jonathan nodded. “I get it.” He closed the comic. “Anyway. I didn’t mean to go on and on.”

  “Yes, please, by all means, stop praising me.” The waitress came back with the rest of her food, and Marzi leaned in to smell the soup, closing her eyes as she inhaled. She was hungrier than she’d realized.

  Jonathan looked as if he were about to say something, but then he just half-smiled and looked down at his coffee cup.

  “What?” Marzi said.

  “Nothing,” Jonathan said. “Just . . . I just wanted to say thanks. You and Lindsay have made me feel really welcome here.”

  “Please. It’s been all spilled beer, crazy people, and—well. Other things.” She didn’t want to mention Daniel, or even think about him, dead in the Red Room, victim of bad brains or something stranger. She pushed her plate over a little, to cover a Western book cover that depicted a masked man aiming his guns at a stagecoach.

  “It’s been an eventful couple of days, sure,” Jonathan said. “But it hasn’t been all bad.”

  “No. I guess not.”

  “I was wondering . . .”

  “Yeah?” She dipped a cheese-covered french fry into a puddle of ketchup and popped it in her mouth.

  “Ah. Is Marzipan really your name?”

  Marzi rolled her eyes, chewed, swallowed. “Yeah. It’s the curse of having unrepentant hippies for parents. It could’ve been worse. One of our neighbors had a little boy named Sunbeam. If I ever have a daughter, I’m going to name her Jennifer or Sue or something.” She cocked her head. “Is that really what you wanted to ask me?”

  “Well, no. I was going to ask if you had any plans today, but then I decided maybe you wouldn’t want to spend time with me, since it hasn’t turned out well the last couple of times.”

  “Maybe we should go someplace where we’re unlikely to be assaulted, then,” she said.

  He spread his hands. “It’s your town.”

  “I can think of a place, but it requires driving.”

  “I’ve got gas money if you’ve got wheels,” Jonathan said. “Or do you lead a carless, monastic life?”

  Marzi seesawed her hand. “I’ve got a beat-up little Honda that used to belong to my dad, but it mostly just sits in my parking space at home. I wouldn’t trust it on a road trip, but it’ll do for a few miles. Just let me finish eating.”

  “You sure this is the right place?” Jonathan asked, as Marzi eased her car over one of the calamitously deep potholes on the side of the road.

  “Yep. Been here a million times.” They’d driven down Highway 1, the scenic coast road, past fields and ocean views. A few miles outside of town, she’d pulled off onto a wide patch of scraped dirt on the shoulder that served as an ad-hoc parking lot. “Just be glad it’s not the rainy season. Some of these potholes turn into little ponds. Lindsay got stuck up to her fenders once going through one.” She stopped the car and pulled up the parking brake. “See the trail?”

  Jonathan nodded, and they got out. Jonathan looked west, toward the sea, and whistled. “That’s beautiful. I’ve never been to a beach where cliffs went right up to the water like this.”

  “Ha,” Marzi said, walking around him. “You haven’t seen anything yet.” She led him over the railroad tracks, to the edge of the cliff, then toward a steep incline where the barest suggestion of a path switchbacked down to a cove below. “Be careful, some of the rocks are loose.”

  “Is this where you dump the bodies?”

  “Ha. You try getting down there with a victim wrapped in burlap thrown over your shoulder.” She led the way, picking her steps but moving quickly, with a smoothness born of familiarity. Jonathan came after, more tentative. Marzi waited for him at the bottom. He jumped the last few feet, landing on the sand in a squat, then stood up and looked around. “This is lovely,” he said. The beach was a sandy semicircle, scattered with a few boulders, bordered by cliffs behind them and on both sides, with the gently rolling blue-gray Pacific beyond.

  “We call it the hole in the wall,” Marzi said.

  Jonathan nodded, still looking around, then frowned. “Why?”

  “You’ll see.” She took his hand and led him toward one of the largest rocks, then around it, revealing an arch in the cliff wall, nestled in the shadows and blocked from casual view by the rock. Like a doorway to Wonderland, a mouse-hole-in-the-baseboard-shaped hole in a rock wall, just big enough for two people to pass through, walking side by side. They walked through, to the long expanse of beach beyond the arch, that stretch of sand that was always a surprise and a revelation, inevitably bigger than Marzi remembered, with water on one side and nearly vertical cliffs on the other. It stretched on for hundreds of yards, a narrow band of clean sand that ended in a tumbling wall of rocks, the collapsed remains of a natural bridge stretching out into the sea.

  “Oh, that’s like magic,” Jonathan said, and Marzi could only agree. She realized she was still holding his hand, and though he hadn’t complained, she let go.

  Marzi walked about half
way down the beach and then sat down, facing the water. The sky beyond was cloudless blue and infinite, the blurry horizon revealing the curvature of the earth.

  “I’ve never seen the Pacific before,” Jonathan said, sitting with her. “I’ve been to the Atlantic Ocean lots of times, but this is the first time I’ve looked at the Pacific. It’s . . . different, somehow. Hard to say why. Maybe just the rocks, the sky, the cliffs . . . I don’t know. There’s some qualitative difference here. It looks more peaceful, deeper, somehow, than the Atlantic. Not as gray.”

  “Really? I’ve never been to the beach on the East Coast, really, just visited Washington, D.C., and New York a couple of times. You’re from North Carolina, right?”

  “Born and raised.”

  “You don’t have much of a Southern accent.”

  “Yeah, well. I worked hard to avoid one.” He picked up a handful of sand and let it sift through his fingers. “My mom’s from the Midwest, and she taught me to talk, so I’m fortunate enough to have a bland accent.”

  “I don’t know. Accents can be sexy.” Marzi wondered at herself. She was flirting, wasn’t she? Well. Why not? Hadn’t she closed herself off long enough?

  “The Gone with the Wind kind of Southern accent, maybe, but that’s not the way they talk in eastern North Carolina, the land of pickup trucks and tobacco fields and turkey houses and swamps. Doesn’t matter how smart the person talking is—to anyone from outside the area, hearing that accent, they think ‘hick.’ It’s too bad. We’ve got the best barbecue in the world down there.”

  “So you like it there?” She settled back on her elbows in the warm sand.

  “Never really lived anywhere else. I’ve visited a few places, New York and Boston and such, but never lived in them for any amount of time. Grew up in the country, then moved to Raleigh when my mom got a better job. The move . . . was pretty hard on me. I left all my friends behind, went to a new high school, and fell in with a different sort of crowd.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Marzi remembered Lindsay’s talk of Jonathan’s desperado vibe, which she’d never particularly noticed. “You’ve got a dark past?”