Quick corner-of-the-eye glances filled Midas’ mind with other images. Lie’s fingers digging into the feather bed, knuckles bleached bone white, nails chewed to the quick. Her fan lying open on the floor in a puddle of sunshine, a heavy iron thing that only an inscrutable Chi-nee would invent. His gun belt hanging from the bedpost just above her left hand, but she wasn’t the kind to go reaching for it even though she carried an iron fan that could probably bust bones as efficiently as a railroad brakeman’s club. No. She was hiding. Eyelids closed, brow straining for high cheekbones like fingers strain for palms when a desperate man makes a fist. Lips drawn back, lavender tongue clamped between her teeth with the same studied effort Midas trained on her nipples.
Thin tangle of brush between her legs like an undertaker’s dark thread, like the crimped legs of a dozen dead black widow spiders.
Nipple between his teeth, Midas grinned. Hell and damnation and dreams that come true. A woman who’d take her man without question or complaint. A woman who wasn’t capable of such nonsense. A woman who had been as mute as the day was long since she’d slipped from between her mama’s legs below decks on a ship bound for the land of gold mountains.
The beauty and voice of a flower. That was the Chinaman’s poetry, as haunting as the work of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe.
A ten-course jerky meal and the music of smacking lips. That was Midas Gerlach’s poetry. A barroom limerick.
Yessiree. The Chinaman had taken the ass-end of the deal, all right. And the best waited below. Midas’ tongue traveled the length of Lie’s belly. Through the tangle of undertaker’s thread, down one firm alabaster thigh. He threw back the sheet — a clean one, catalog-bought and saved expressly for this occasion. Two teeny little stumps waited at the base of Lie’s ankles, both of them just as white as white could be, each one dotted with five little nubbins twisting this way and that, wriggling this little piggy went to market, this little piggy went to town…
Midas took one toe between his lips, then another. This little piggy had roast beef… this little piggy had none. Suckled like a contented baby. Wee wee wee… all the way home.
Home. China was a world away, but in his heart of hearts Midas knew that he belonged there. With his face buried in yellowback adventure novels he’d loved since he was just a sprout, he often dreamed of foreign shores even though his dead granddaddy’s voice still rang in his head. Those books ain’t manly things. Maybe that’s the way it was in the San Joaquin Valley shitsplat called Fiddler, California, but it wasn’t that way everywhere. Midas liked to read about Chinamen and their ways. He understood them — them with their dungeons and concubines and silk robes heavy with the perfume of opium. Even though he was a white man and a Christian, he understood the things those yellow men liked to do.
Wonderful things. Outre oriental practices that the book writers barely dared relate. Veiled descriptions which trapped Midas’ breath in his throat. Wicked scimitars that could split a man dandruff to dingleberry with one stroke. Opium dreams that taught a man the truth of his heart. Wives by the dozen, each one familiar with the taste of the whip. And best of all, feet sculpted like those at the base of Lie’s alabaster legs, tender young feet wrapped with long strips of silk. Ribbons circling tighter, tighter, tight as a Merry Christmas that never comes.
Bound feet. Saving part of a little girl for ever and ever in a grown woman’s body.
Midas closed his eyes. Suddenly he wasn’t the biggest fish in the little pond called Fiddler, California. He wasn’t a man who ate flapjacks for breakfast and broke horses with a brakeman’s club and drank cheap tequila out of a whore’s high-button shoe and shot down drummers in the local saloons if they so much as cracked a smile when he got to studying their assortments of ladies’ footwear.
For in his mind’s eye Midas was a man who eschewed denim, preferring garments fashioned from the finest oriental silk. His hair was oiled with strange perfumes instead of barber’s tonic. His bed chamber was heavy with the spicy tang of incense. Not one whiff of tequila or horseshit or lonely man’s sweat assaulted his refined olfactory senses.
But, even in the pit of his reverie, it was still Lie’s toe that was trapped between his lips. The toe of a Chi-nee princess raised expressly for his pleasure.
Because, in the pit of his reverie, Midas Gerlach was the Emperor of China, and he suckled on that toe as if it were the tit of the Empress Dowager herself.
Eyes open now.
The coyote’s words had been wise, for this was not the way it was supposed to be.
Breasts raw and red. Thin line of blood weeping from tongue.
She could not speak, but she could hear. Too well. Each little sound was amplified a hundredfold. Father said that evil spirits had stolen her voice when she was still in her mother’s belly, so the Gods had given her the hearing of a dragon in return.
White man sucking. A hungry man slurping noodles. Skin of a ghost hanging loosely from his bones like clean laundry flapping on a hot August breeze. Blue veins. Cold hands. Ghost hands. But his teeth were sharp. The teeth of the hungry goblin from her mother’s midnight stories.
The goblin with brown hair curling over his chest and shoulders.
Hair the color of the herbalist’s bitter roots.
Herbs that made her retch but didn’t give her a voice.
Father said the herbalist was a cheat.
Father took the herbalist’s tongue with a hatchet.
Father’s justice.
But Father was not here to protect her. Father was in San Francisco with the white goblin’s money. Using it to take another’s money by now. That was the way of it. Sure as she’d never touch the hard earth of Father’s homeland. Sure as the white goblin was sucking her twisted toes.
His clothes on the floor. The shed hide of a goblin.
Her clothes in the fire, flame and ash.
And in the corner — towering over the palace of the Empress Dowager, a giant in the Empress’ own private courtyard — the pine woman stood waiting, not daring to shrink from the flames.
Waiting, pine body straining against a white dress of silk and lace. Dancing flames casting her pine shadow over the curving roof of the palace. White veil a bleached shadow over slivered lips.
In China, white was the color of mourning.
The goblin stopped his sucking. Opened his eyes. Nudged Lie’s raw, red breasts with his evil chin, licking his horrid pink lips.
Lie made the pine woman’s face her own. She traveled to a place deep inside herself, a secret place far from the white goblin’s house. A place where he could not reach her.
And from that place, for the first time, the young daughter of the Mysterious East caught the bitter scent of the white goblin’s hidden gold.
Midas knew his limit, and he’d done reached it.
Hurriedly, he rose and christened his bride-to-be. She just lay there and took it like a dream. He had to pick her up before she’d even move. He set her in front of the dresser mirror, and she stood there as still and stiff as the pine dressmaker’s dummy in the corner of the room. Midas had to pour water into the bowl for her, wet the cloth. But damned if he was going to wipe her down, and she seemed to know it. Cool cloth in her tiny hand, she got the idea and busied herself.
Midas watched her from behind, but she was perfect and demure and didn’t dare catch his eye in the mirror. Her eyes were downcast, staring into the depths of the reflection, studying the fire that burned in the fireplace behind her and the model of the Empress Dowager’s palace that dominated the floor of Midas’ bedroom.
Midas had lovingly assembled the model, recreating every detail from vivid descriptions found in one of his yellowback novels. He wanted to tell Lie about it — what the model meant to him, the dreams it held — but all that would have to wait. Right now he didn’t want to talk. He only wanted to drink in her beauty, which jerked him around like a stiff shot of tequila.
Sweat on her tight little buttocks, twin globes that were as slick and shiny as a co
uple of perfect pearls. From behind, she looked like an innocent little girl. And maybe she was. Haired over, but just barely. Spider-leg hairs. Hairs like undertaker’s thread.
No. Midas licked at the salty-sweet, faintly leatherish taste in his mouth. He closed his eyes and concentrated on a flavor that had no equal.
A sweet blossom’s flavor. The Chinaman’s own daughter. Or so the Chinaman said. But the Chinaman was a man who owned a gambling hall, and a man like that wasn’t exactly on intimate terms with the truth. That’s what a lawman up in San Francisco had told one of Midas’ gun-dogs.
But the Chinaman had been straight about the girl. Maybe not about the daughter part — maybe that part was supposed to make the deal more appealing in an outre oriental way, like the things described in those yellowback novels — but he’d been straight about the rest of it. He’d delivered. He’d sent the girl down from San Francisco in a wagon so there wouldn’t be any fuss or gossip at the train station, just like he’d promised.
Midas stepped past the dressmaker’s dummy, his hairy shoulder brushing the bridal gown he’d had made special for Lie. He stood next to it, tall and proud in the courtyard of the Empress Dowager’s palace, dwarfing the structure. Sunlight glinted off the sloping angles of a dozen golden roofs, warming Midas’ naked skin.
Midas was a man who could never get warm enough.
He stood in the sunlight, staring at the same scene that had greeted him every day for thirty-three years. The Gerlach family plot was a hundred feet from his window. His granddaddy’s headstone dwarfed those surrounding it, his mama’s headstone on one side and his grandma’s on the other. Only one thing was different about the scene today. There was a nigger out there on Midas’ property, about fifty feet this side of the family plot and another twenty paces or so to the west, pretty near the old outhouse where the best part of Midas’ granddaddy had been so shamefully interred lo those many years ago. This nigger had a shovel lashed to his shot-up hand with a length of barbed wire, and he was busy digging a new shit shaft in the hard, hot earth of Fiddler, California.
Midas scratched his head. Still all pixilated from his frolic with Lie, but Jesus, he needed to calm down and think this through.
The Chinaman had sent Lie, sure. But he’d also sent the nigger. Nigger had been the one driving the wagon.
But he wasn’t a wagon-driving kind of buck. Not hardly. He was a buck gunfighter. Buck bounty man, actually, to put the right name to it. A gunman with a Navy Colt secreted beneath his canvas duster. Imagine that. A wagon-driving buck with the stink of sweat and horseshit and trail dust about him trying to draw down on Midas Gerlach on the very ranch where three generations of Gerlachs had been born and bred.
That didn’t go down too good, not in this county. Midas was a wanted man, sure. Everyone knew that. But the Gerlachs ruled the town of Fiddler, the whole damn county. A network of cousins and uncles and assorted bastards kept things going the way they’d always gone. No one was going to collect the bounty on Midas Gerlach. Especially not some nigger with a Navy Colt.
The price on Midas’ head was a doozy, though. Truth be told, he was mighty proud of it. The larger the dollar sign, the larger the man. That’s what his granddaddy had always said. And Midas had earned it, too. Not in any pedestrian manner, mind you. Nothing so simple as the murder of man, woman, or child.
People up in Sacramento City still talked about it. How some rich rancher staying at a ritzy hotel by the river carved up a whore with the French chef’s best cutlery. Paiute Injun whore who had a real taste for brandy with a slice of summer peach, and the law still held him accountable, even though anyone who knew the Gerlach clan from Midas’ granddaddy on down damn well knew that the whole bunch of them couldn’t control their passions when the brandy had them by the balls. Peached or straight it did not matter.
But it wasn’t the cutting up part that had bothered the good citizens of Sacramento City. It was the simple fact that Midas (in the pixilated afterglow of a frolic similar to the one he’d just enjoyed with Lie) had sautéed the slut’s feet in the French chef’s best skillet, cooking her little toesies to a golden brown in a rich sauce of champagne and wild mushrooms and plenty of butter. When the hotel staff found him after the deed was done, sixty-two bones lay stripped clean on the hotel’s finest Staffordshire Blue china, and Midas was working his bicuspids with a toothpick. His disposition was later described as more than agreeable by the concierge, certainly polite despite a few discreet belches. In fact, everything seemed just fine and dandy until the hotel doorman peeked into the kitchen and confronted the untended remains of Midas’ gustatory extravaganza, at which point the hale and hearty Irishman promptly lost the half-pint of whiskey that had insulated him against the surprisingly intemperate June weather.
The Sacramento City papers played it up big. Said that Midas was worse than that Alferd Packer fellow out Colorado way, worse than the miserable wretches who called themselves the Donner Party. And then the gentlemen of the press got to embellishing the story, and pretty soon Midas found that he had consumed not only the whore’s feet but also the French chef’s privates — cooked up with a big mess of oysters was how the story went — and that little tale put the noblest son of the house of Gerlach off his feed for a full week. Such embellishments continued, each revelation helping to jack the bounty on Midas’ head to Tower of Babel proportions, until it got to the point where Diamond Jim Brady himself might get all wet in the mouth and strap on a gun, let alone some buck with a scarred Colt that had most-likely seen its last duty at Gettysburg.
Such memories aroused a man’s thirst. Midas stepped across the courtyard of the Empress Dowager’s palace, bent low and removed the roof of a building that had housed the Empress’ eunuchs. He snatched up a bottle of tequila, taking dim satisfaction, as always, in his choice of hiding place.
He washed the taste of Lie’s toes from his mouth, one pleasure eclipsing the other, while he watched the nigger work.
Hell and damnation. Diamond Jim was going to have to get in line. Discounting the Pinkerton men, the buck was the third gunman to come looking for Midas just this month. He was the only one to get as far as the ranch. Or maybe he was just the first one to get to the ranch. And him with shaggy boots that looked to be made from dead rats and tattered clothes that maybe fit him when thirty or forty pounds of extra meat hung on his bones.
Midas drank. This buck wasn’t scarecrow skinny, though. He was what you’d call rangy. Tough — all hungry-eyed and Sunday-serious. He made those Pinkerton men look like weepy choir boys. Took his beating like one of Midas’ prize horses, all proudlike. Even the ranch hands — trigger-happy desperados, every one — had to admit that this buck had a different stripe to him, and they were the kind of men who hated niggers more than any other creatures that walked on two legs.
The buck could shoot, too. Clipped Midas’ ear, but that wasn’t anything to get excited about. Hell, it was Midas who shot the gun out of the buck’s hand just as slick and cool as Deadwood Dick.
But all Midas had to do was take one look at the buck to know that the bastard was as good as finished. Buck out there digging a hole. Digging his own grave.
Well that wasn’t rightly true. Not quite.
Midas took a final swig of tequila, crunching the worm between his teeth as he glanced at Lie. She’d dried her buttocks with a towel. They didn’t shine like pearls anymore. No, now her sweetcheeks had the look of cool marble monuments that might have been carved by Michelangelo himself.
Midas swallowed the worm. Such unsullied beauty as that of his bride-to-be couldn’t be forced to sit upon the outdoor privy Midas and his boys had employed lo these many years. That wasn’t to be. By God, the bride of Midas Gerlach would not suffer a splinter in her behind. Neither would she breathe the unseemly combustulations of a dozen sworn profligates.
So the buck bounty man wasn’t digging his own grave. He was digging a new shit shaft for Midas Gerlach’s bride-to-be. The old shit shaft would be the buc
k’s grave, though Midas worried that it was slightly sacrilegious to bury a nigger in the same spot where lay Granddaddy Gerlach’s pecker, be it shit shaft or no.
But he also figured that the buck could go to his final reward knowing that his last task on God’s green earth had been a noble one, for there was no nobler effort than shielding true beauty from the undeniable vulgarity which thrived within this vale of tears. At least, that was the opinion of a certain poet from the Mysterious East.
Midas figured that the stranger wouldn’t understand that, though. It didn’t really matter, because the stranger didn’t have a whole lot more understanding to do.
All he had to do was dig a hole.
Then he had to take enough bullets so that he’d fall into another one.
Then he had to die.
Maybe not in that precise order. Midas chuckled. If the stranger was really smart, he’d stomach as much lead as he could, just to be sure he was dead through before he plummeted into the fetid abyss.
The barbed wire had gouged a raw trench through the flesh of his wrist just as thoroughly as a crown — or more properly, a bracelet — of thorns might have done, and the bullet hole through his hand had the angry look of a cheap steak dredged in pepper and Louisiana Tabasco, but the stranger didn’t feel any pain. After hours of digging in the hot sun without water or a single minute’s rest, he barely felt anything. He only felt himself and the shovel, the hard earth, and the heat.
He didn’t know who or where or even what he was. Not anymore. Not in this hellish furnace of a place. Not with slow trickles of blood weeping from his hand. Hand a part of the shovel handle. Booted feet stomping shovel blade. Left, then right. Biting the earth. His boots, each one bristling with the razor teeth of a dozen midnight horrors, biting the earth and making it whimper.
The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists Page 36