by Barry Reese
One of the three, a man who looked hauntingly familiar squirmed uncomfortably at this news. His scalp was visible through his tumbleweed hair, and a long scar ran from his ear to a cleft chin. He stared into the two fingers of gin on the counter before him like a Chinese fortuneteller did to a pot of tea. Maybe he was seeing his future there. He slammed the shot and headed up to one of the rental rooms on the second floor.
Matt followed the man, careful to dodge johns and whores as they came down the stairs. His feet felt light against the steps, as if that force was pulling him up by his suspenders. It had grown stronger in the minutes since he’d shot the smith, but undaunted, Matt pressed forward. He started to have visions and had to grab the rail for support. Scenes from his life flashed in front of him:
Matt the child coming across the prairie with his folks.
Matt the young deputy learning under a great teacher.
Matt the young man in love.
The ghost got himself to his feet and continued pursuit. Each image was harder to take:
Matt the naive sheriff.
Matt the new husband.
Matt the father.
A noise came from the Kid, half-laugh, half-sob, as the next wave subsided.
I thought your life flashed before your eyes at the moment before your death, not a couple hours later?
The memory of Matt the Vigilante nearly toppled him over the balcony.
By the time he’d reached the landing, Matthew Ragsdale was burned away and only the Rag Doll Kid remained.
The Kid leaned warily against the open door to the room his prey had entered. The pudgy man had his back to him. He was gathering up articles of clothing and tossing them haphazardly into a bag. The man who instigated the Kid’s death turned slightly and his face was reflected in a vanity mirror.
A final vision came, yet caused no pain, just bringing with it a sense of understanding. The Kid poised at the edge of a ravine. A madman with his hand on a holster. Words that ultimately meant nothing now. A movement. A drawing of guns. Flashes of light and blood and a scream as the villain went over the side and down some three hundred feet into the raging waters of a spring-flooded Oak Creek.
No one could have survived that. No one sane. No one human.
“Hello, James.”
James Kettle caught an image of his stalker in the mirror, but couldn’t find him after he spun and drew. The Kid was impressed that the jiggly man had drawn so quickly from his hip.
“Where are you, Kid? We got us some things to settle.”
The former Sheriff stepped inside and walked past James. He spoke from the other side of the room.
“Oh, I agree. Just not in the way you’re thinking.”
Again James spun with a speed that belied his age and shape.
“Not bad, James. Looks like you’ve managed to keep that arm in shape despite the rest of you going to seed.”
James guffawed, “Seven years, Kid! Had a lot of time for practice. Never could get the draw on you before, could I?”
The Kid moved to a new spot.
“Nope, just bank guards, drunken gamblers and one woman and her child.”
“Stop with the tricks, Kid,” James demanded, sweat leaking from his pate. He targeted the new place the Kid’s voice came from, “I’m guessing the smith gave me up. He was so sure he could kill you. Hard to believe he missed.”
“Oh, but James…”
The Kid stepped up to an inch of James’s face. Despite his spirit state, he could smell the whiskey on the breath of his former archenemy.
“He didn’t.”
The Rag Doll Kid pushed Kettle hard, forcing the outlaw to fall backwards onto the bed. Kettle rolled over it and landed on the opposite side in front of the window. Fear and alarm stood arm-in-arm with Kettle as he tried to find something to shoot.
“Jimmy Kettle, leader of the Claw Rock Gang, wanted for the rape and murder of Sarah Ragsdale, wife of Matthew Ragsdale, and the murder of Trina Ragsdale, daughter of Matthew Ragsdale.
“I am a vengeful spirit. I failed to kill you once, now I claim my due.”
The Kid picked up the commode from the floor and threw it with all the strength he had available. It flew across the distance and hit Kettle square in the head. The outlaw stumbled backwards and through the window. The Kid heard the recognizable scream cut short this time.
When he peered out the shattered remains of the window, he saw the broken body laying prone over a hitching post. Jimmy twitched for a moment or two, then died.
The spiritual pull was now even greater as the Kid descended the stairs and exited the saloon. He wanted to look on the body closely, to make sure he’d done his work right this time, but the crowd was even thicker.
The sound of horses at full gallop brought everyone’s attention around. The men who had ridden off to Matt’s cabin had returned with his body slung over the back of his horse. It wasn’t making any sense to those in charge.
“The body was cold and stiff,” said the town doctor. “He’d been dead awhile, maybe late last night or early this mor-ning.”
“But that woulda been before the smithy,” said one official.
Gasps and prayers were heard as the realization struck them.
“If not the Rag Doll Kid, then who?”
An older man called out, “This is Jimmy Kettle, the guy that Sheriff Matt, I mean, the Kid swore he’d killed. Maybe he was cleaning up some loose ends. Maybe all this was some sorta payback.”
There were murmurs of agreement, and everyone seemed satisfied. They’d write off Kettle’s death as an accident, cosmic justice to an evil soul. Nobody wanted to think too hard on it.
“The Rag Doll Kid is dead and Jimmy Kettle is officially dead. The people of Drowned Horse can breathe easy again,” intoned the preacher, who’d come up to give last rites to both.
Hearing the name spoken aloud, the Kid looked to a spot on his belt for the first time since his death.
It wasn’t there.
The Kid made his way around and saw the small stuffed toy on his own dead hip. It had been his good luck charm since the day he pried it from Trina’s cold hand. He wore it as he hunted down the gang of outlaws that had kidnapped and killed her and his wife, Sarah. And after the Kid had dispatched them, he continued to wear it as he hunted down and showed no mercy to the dozen men and women who had stood aside that fateful night and let Jimmy Kettle do his devil’s work on his family.
The Kid gingerly spirited the doll away from the corpse without anyone’s notice and held it to his chest. The pull was inescapable now. He let it lift him up. He passed the rooftops in an instant. Clouds surrounded him and he left his burdens there. The release was welcome after so many years of torment, of guilt, feeling like his actions had led to the murder of his loved ones. He wanted to kill himself after he’d finished his crusade, but held on. As the stars guided him, he understood he’d been kept on Earth to dispense one last piece of justice. Now, the scales were bal-anced.
As Matthew Ragsdale crossed over eternity, he saw little hands reaching out toward him. He handed them the rag doll and accepted a hug in exchange.
THEY CALL HIM PAT
by Ian Taylor
Saying that Pat wasn’t like the other folks in Salina was kind of like saying that horses weren’t a lot like beer. It was obvious to anybody that looked at him that he wasn’t from around those parts. He was bald for one thing – in fact, those that’d seen him with his shirt off while he was working in the fields swore that the fella didn’t seem to have a sprout of hair on his entire body. His skin was gray too, not the ashy gray of a corpse, but dark gray, like the sky when an all too infrequent thunderstorm blew across the valley. Besides that, he had big, black, kinda teardrop-shaped eyes.
The people of Salina were put off by his appearance at first, like you’d expect, but Pat won them over real quick. He came from far away, yeah, but it wasn’t like that wasn’t true of everybody in town. Salina had only been founded ten years earlier,
when the General set an army of men to expanding the ancient canals that ran through the empty Arizona valley. The canals had been made by the Indians, most likely, or whatever came before them, and it didn’t take long for modern technology to make them bigger and better. Now Salina was a thriving farming community out in the middle of what could politely be called desolation.
It wasn’t just that Pat was a fellow immigrant that set the townspeople at their ease, though. Funny looking or no, he could charm the ring out of an angry bull’s nostrils. He regularly closed down the saloons with the working men, but was always there bright and early the next day, sometimes hours before the sun peeked up over the Ocotillo Mountains, tending the General’s herds or working in Old Man Robinson’s fields or whatever other odd job he’d picked up. He could tell a joke that’d have a hanging judge squirting milk out of his nose, and he could switch that humor from dry to bawdy as quick as a whip. He worked more than anybody else and accepted the same amount of pay as the other men. Despite his smooth, bulbous head, creepy black eyes, and tiny mouth, there were more than a few women in town – whores and ladies alike – who would have liked to spend an evening with Pat.
But that was one way Pat wasn’t like everybody else. He had a family back home, and his goal was to earn enough to bring them here, to buy some land and work it and create a home for them. He was devoted to his wife in a way that most men only pay lip service to. No woman in Salina ever felt those spindly gray arms around her.
Now the valley that Salina was built in was right in the middle of Navajo country, and the Navajo were understandably a little perturbed about that. For a long time they’d mostly let Salina be because they had bigger problems with the Mexicans. Eventually, though, all those canals the General had built siphoned off enough of their water that they couldn’t ignore the town anymore, nor content themselves with the odd bit of rustling or thievery. A couple of the local tribes banded together and started making trouble for the town. They burned houses, rustled cattle, carried off a child or two, and when the townsfolk couldn’t take it anymore, they turned to the General, the man who had brought them all here in the first place, and told him he had to do something, or he was going to have as much trouble from the white folks as they were all having from the Natives.
Pat was working for the General at that time, and having caught wind of the local discontent and being the community-minded… well, whatever he was, he offered to parley with the tribes on our behalf. Out of desperation or perhaps a vague hope that Pat’s appearance would scare the Navajo off, the General agreed. He formed a sizeable posse and put Pat in charge of it, then pointed them in the direction of the nearest known tribe and bid them go with God.
The posse was on the move for less than a day before they were attacked by a pack of braves, probably on their way back to Salina for some more raiding. The braves pinned the posse down in the rocks at the base of the Ocotillos. Nobody knows those rocks better than the Navajo and the posse was getting chewed to pieces by gunfire. They couldn’t even tell how much they were outnumbered by, and just as the survivors were casting about for somebody with underwear clean enough to use for a white flag, Pat stepped right out into the hail of gunfire.
Pat owned a dusty old six-gun he used when he was working cattle jobs, but that wasn’t what he was wearing on his hip that day. That day it was a gleaming metal thing, bulbous at the back end, with three bright red rings stacked along the length of the barrel. From all accounts, Pat cast his big black eyes across the brush and outcroppings that surrounded them once, ignoring the spray of dust and rock as lead plunked down all around him, and then he drew that gun and pulled the trigger.
It was lightning that came out of the gun’s business end, not lead. Blue lightning by all accounts. Pat held the trigger down and strafed the landscape to right and left. Brush exploded into blue flames and braves were thrown from their hiding spots by the bursts, some of them on fire too. The Indians were fleeing as fast as they’d appeared and Pat, ordering some of the men to stay behind and tend to the wounded, leapt onto his horse and led the rest of the posse after them.
Pat chased those braves over eight miles of desert and mountain, occasionally hitting them with the lightning gun again whenever they got the urge to turn and fight. Eventually, the braves realized that they were being followed home and tried to lead the posse off to the south of their encampment. But Pat knew where they were supposed to be going, and he broke from the braves to head east instead. The braves tried to circle behind them and attack their rear, but the posse’s regular guns were enough to fight them off by that point.
When they reached the camp, the posse rode right through the middle of it, most of the men running interference for Pat while he blew up every teepee he saw. When they’d made two passes, and the Navajo women and children were scattering everywhere like a bunch of stinger-less bees, Pat found the old chief and told him to carry a message to his amigos, that Salina was off-limits, and if they couldn’t live here without starting a ruckus… well, there was plenty of room down in Mexico. He put a period on the sentence by blowing up the old chief’s wigwam.
The posse had nearly killed their horses chasing the braves, so they took the tribe’s horses and rode back into Salina the day after they’d left, carrying one of the old chief’s wives as collateral against him keeping his promise. Pat had been popular before, but now he was a hero, and the posse he had rode with would drink for free on the story of that triumphant ride for weeks to come.
The General, who had seen Pat’s mission as nothing more than a delaying tactic, was grateful beyond his ability to express it – and considering the General’s gift for oratory, that was saying something indeed. So instead of making a speech, he gave Pat his own plot of land in thanks, forty choice acres carved out of the nicest part of the General’s own estate. Pat no longer had to work for anybody except himself.
And work he did. Pat was the only member of his posse who never once drank for free off the story of his Navajo conquest, because he never made it to the saloon after that. Instead, he was working from morning to night on that land. He used some money he’d socked away to buy two oxen and hire a couple men to help him. It was early in April at this point, nearly the end of the spring planting season. Most farmers didn’t like to plant that late for fear that Arizona’s summer sun would roast their crops before they were ripe enough for harvest. But it was either plant or let the land lay fallow until autumn. Pat decided he’d take the chance.
Pat disappeared into the little shack he’d thrown up on the edge of the property, delaying the planting by another week. Everybody thought he was crazy, of course… but they were wrong, because when he came out of the shack, he had modified that lightning gun he’d used on the Indians somehow. There were fewer rings now, and an odd little rectangular contraption soldered onto the back. His hired hands thought he was going to blow them sky high when he pointed it at the wagonload of corn seed, but this time when he pulled the trigger, a soft blue light came out, and the little box attached to the back glowed. One by one, he shone that light on each of the seed bags, stopping every once in a while when the box on the back got too hot. And every time he’d finish with a bag, he’d get the men to work sowing it right away.
Three weeks later Pat’s corn was as tall as the farmers who’d planted at the beginning of the season. Over the next months, he harvested and sold them himself at market, and sold out in a couple of days while his competitors had ears piled up for weeks afterward. People couldn’t wait to try Pat’s miracle corn, and the ones that were lucky enough to score some of it swore it was the best they’d ever tasted.
Now some of the other local farmers approached Pat, interested in learning the secret of his blue ray, but Pat didn’t have time. He was taking the summer off, rather than rotating new crops onto the land, in order to prepare for the next round of his super corn. He was convinced he could get two crops in the autumn season, which sounded like madness… but then again, a fully mature
crop in three weeks would have sounded like madness at the beginning of the spring, and Pat had done it.
He started by redrawing his irrigation lines, and then used most of the profit from his first harvest to commission Salina’s smith to build a dozen tall iron tripods, each one ten feet high with a tiny rotating harness suspended beneath it. Pat hauled these monstrosities out into his fields and planted them, and then he disappeared back into that shack for the hottest weeks of summer.
There were starting to be some grumblings among the townsfolk regarding Pat. It had been months since he’d routed the Indians, and that sort of thing tends to fall out of the community’s memory pretty quick, especially since nobody’d heard a peep out of the local tribes during that time. Pat had done such a good job of defeating them that he made it really easy to forget how bad it had been before he’d intervened. And he wasn’t seen around town at all anymore. Always, he was tucked away in his shack or working in his fields. It gave folks the impression that he’d gone snooty, and the other local farmers were still sore enough about him not sharing his blue ray with them that they took every opportunity to sow the general discontent with Pat.
When he finally emerged from the shack, he had a dozen tiny metal boxes, sort of like the one that had been welded onto his lightning gun during the spring season. They all looked kind of cobbled together, so most folks figured he’d cannibalized the lightning gun to make them. He put one of these boxes on each of his tripods, suspending them in that rotating harness. Then he started plowing and getting ready to sow his new crop.
This time he didn’t shine his blue ray on the seed. He just seeded the ground, then kept eleven field hands on after planting to stand out in the fields under those tripods, using a long pole to reach up and turn the boxes in their harnesses. The boxes glowed blue all through the night.
A month later, Pat had forty acres full of the fattest, heaviest ears of corn the people of Salina had ever seen. He harvested and sold them by the pound, then turned the fields and replanted, starting on his second crop of the season two months before any other local farmers had harvested their first.