The Trials of Solomon Parker

by Eric Scott Fischl

  Once Michael is done gagging and puking into the dirt at their feet, Sol and Faraday each reach down, grab a skinny arm by the pit, and hoist the boy upright. Michael sags against their hands, wobbling, sobbing for air and, soon enough, just sobbing.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t know I didn’t know I’m sorry–”

  Sol slaps him, not too hard this time, just enough to focus the boy’s attention. “Shut up now, son. Just shut the fuck up, hey? OK?” They step him over to the alley wall, stand him up in a heap of garbage. “Now, can we let you go, or are you just going to fall over and puke some more? Huh?” Sol slaps him again.

  “I’m sorry I’m sorry–”

  Another slap because, Jesus, even as a kid Michael’s mouth runs too busy, teeth chattering on with no connection to brain. Fucking little raconteur, still, isn’t he. “Goddamn it, I said shut up. Shut it! Boy’s not much of a listener, hey Nick? Maybe he’s simple. You simple, son?”

  “No s–” Michael stops himself and smacks his swollen lips shut, shaking his head with excess vigor. “Mm.”

  “Well, there now, you see, Nick? Not simple at all, turns out, our lad here.”

  “Wonders never, Sol.”

  Sol hardens his expression, pressing one extended finger into Michael’s chickeny chest, pushing him tight against the wall. He’s careful not to step in the sodden, stinking pile of garbage and ruin his good shoes. “Maybe not simple, but fucking stupid, though, huh? Stupid. And do you know why you’re stupid, you little Irish fuckhead, Michael Conroy of County Dipshit?”

  Michael’s headshake turns into a quivery nod. He’s crying hard now, and Sol wants to slap him a few times more, just on general principle, for being a whiny, snot-nosed little crybaby, but the work is done and he’s on a fucking schedule, no time to indulge his pleasure. Instead, he just gives the boy another hard poke in the sternum, one that will leave a sharp round bruise and hopefully serve as a reminder, at least until hunger or laziness gets the better of the kid and sends him back to his larcenous ways. He’s been warned once before this, Michael; the next warning won’t be as gentle, not at all. There’s a way things are done: there are rules and there are appearances to maintain. Exceptions are not made, not for anyone, not even a skinny teenager who looks like he hasn’t had a straight meal in a week. No exceptions for anyone.

  Sol stabs the finger once more. “You are fucking stupid, Michael Dipshit Conroy, because you know you don’t steal from Sean Harrity.” Punctuating each word with another poke to the chest. Sol can’t resist, and gives the boy one last hard slap upside the head. “Now get the fuck out of here. And hey: if I even see you again, I’ma kill you.”

  So it’s not the greatest work in the world, slapping around teenaged petty thieves and all variety of whores and debtors and Chinks and junkies and whoever else happens to need it on the day, keeping Sean’s growing collection of fuck-cribs and hop houses and gambling joints on an even keel, but it’s work and Sol is good at it, very good at it, turns out. It fits him, this work, fits the man he is now, and it’s even enjoyable at times. He always has money in his pocket, girls when he wants them. He’s a respected – if not respectable – member of the community. He gets up late every morning after the long nights, has his coffee and breakfast in a clean, well-appointed room. When he goes out, he’s well dressed and sharp looking. There’s never dirt under his fingernails and he smells of expensive, spicy aftershave, good tobacco.

  Not for him, twelve hours down a fucking hole in the ground, wet and filthy, ripe with stink, skin rough and blistered, spine and joints and knees aching from the work. Paid shit and likely to die from one day to the next, if not by accident or negligence than certainly once the miner’s con settles in his lungs. Fuck that. He’d never even thought to come back to Butte this time around but things had worked out as they had and here he is, but sitting pretty for once.

  He’s taking a break now after checking in on some of the girls he looks after, relaxing in an overstuffed, comfortable easy chair, a glass of good, smooth whiskey in one hand – the kind he never saw before at the Stope, or any of the other shitholes he used to frequent – a cigarette in the other. Later, if he feels like it, he’ll get his prick sucked by Maggie or one of the others, maybe that new one, the young tart whose name he can never remember, with that big, round, soft-looking ass.

  Sean is a piece of shit and, sometimes, Sol finds what he has to do distasteful but, quickly enough, that distaste goes back to wherever it’s come from because, really, it doesn’t fucking matter. He doesn’t care any more, about much of anything, really, so why even bother trying. If there’s anything Sol has learned in his life, lives, it’s that: nothing really fucking matters, not when you lean down and look it hard in the eye. Everything is transient, the good and the shit and all that squats in between. Life might keep you up at night, give you bad dreams, sometimes, but that doesn’t matter either, because anything, everything, might be taken away from you from one minute to the next, no matter what you do. No matter how hard you try to stop it. Life is stronger than you are and will roll out how it will and fuck you if you get in its way. So best, then, to just get what you want while the getting is there and anyone who tries to come between you and your desires can go fuck themselves.

  It’s hard and it’s cold and it’s selfish but that’s the fucking world, isn’t it? This one, or any of the others, so fuck it.

  He hadn’t come to this understanding quickly, or easily, but come to him it had, eventually. Seems obvious now, really, but it hadn’t always been that way and look at the fucking mess he’d made of everything, over and over, until he realized the way of things. OK, sure, he wasn’t maybe never going to be voted Man of the Year by the Order of Hibernians, but here he was, beholden to no one – aside from his employer, whom he could leave whenever he fucking well liked – with this glass of good whiskey and a smoke and the prospect of a cock-sucking later from a young girl with lips that were as full and soft as her ass. Seemed pretty all right, those things, when you gave them your notice. There was some saying about the unexamined life, the gist of it Sol doesn’t remember; far as he can tell, upon examination, his life looks pretty sorted, now and, if there were aspects of it that chafed around the gizzard, well, best just put those to the side because they were doing fuck-all good for him, were he to fret about them. Just button up and get on with it, like his mama used to say. Get over it.

  Funny how things had worked out, though, him here in Butte, which was just about the last place he’d expected to fetch up, and working for Sean Harrity, of all people. But here he was.

  After the thing with Billy, those years ago, he hadn’t spent much time in jail. There were circumstances, after all, extenuating, really, plus it was just some Indian kid, as the law saw it. Not much sympathy there, really, world being the way it was. When Sol had gotten out, he’d gone on a bender that gave a whole new level of meaning to the word. By the time he’d gotten back to himself some, Ag had already taken Lizzie up to his hospital so there wasn’t much of anything keeping him in Stevensville, what with his tavern shut up and his house burned down. So he left.

  The next couple three years passed in a bit of a haze, what with drinking too much and maybe the little shine of lunatic he’d taken on. Best not to think on that, either, when it came up in front of him as it did from time to time. Just have another drink, do something to occupy himself. He found work when he really needed it, those years, but for the most part, he was a bum. Just a bum but, really, that didn’t seem to bother him much.

  Sol the bum, who drank himself blind for damn sure, often as he could, got in plenty of fights, wound up in jail more times than he could count, for one thing or another. Shuffled from one town to the next, leaving a trail of blood and booze and mayhem. At some level, he kept expecting to see that old snake-haired Indian turn up, smiling that smile of his and shaking those little marked-on bones. But he never had and, really, Sol knew that he himself was done with gambling. Knew that like he knew l
ittle else in this life, could feel it in his belly.

  Funny, too, that the one vice that had landed him in the shitheap that had been his life before, what with his debts to Sean Harrity and all the sorrow that that had started, the games with the old Indian, tobacco for heartache, that one vice was gone, now – poof! – subsumed in all the myriad others he was trying on for fit. And they did feel snug and well cut to his frame, damn near all of them.

  And even funnier that it was Sean Harrity, Sean fucking Harrity, professional asshole, once the bane of Sol’s life, who had been the one to pull him out of that last downhill collapse and get him set back to rights. Turned out that a man Sol had beaten damn near to death up in Helena, over a disagreement about a young lady – although perhaps lady was a bit of a strong word for the girl in question – had been a man for whom Sean himself carried very strong feelings, of the negative sort. That accidental favor had been parlayed into bail money and, once out of jail – again – the prospect of employment in the bustling, up and coming metropolis that was Butte, Montana, the Richest Hill on Earth. Where one Sean Seamus Harrity was a rising star in the scum-drenched, drink-soaked and shit-smeared underbelly of that particular society.

  Sol can’t help but laugh, now, because it’s a hell of a thing: here he is, couple few years later, rich as Croesus – relatively – in his well-made soft clothes, clean-shaven and perfumed like a Paris whore. Old, expensive whiskey and good, ready-made cigarette to hand, feeling the hum of blood in his prick at the thought of that little girl’s lips that will be working it soon enough. David Solomon Parker, professional villain, strong right hand to none other than Sean Harrity, top shitheel of Butte. Sol Parker, with his nice room and fat wallet and bruised-up, scarred knuckles, knife in his boot and fuck anyone who looks at him sideways because he’s Sol Parker, Sean Harrity’s man, meanest bastard that walks the streets of this fucking town.

  Hell of a thing.

  2.

  The women say that no man should live longer than his days in this world; that, if a man does somehow manage that feat, the shock of it will sunder him.

  Such was the case for Siinatssi, to be sure, for, when he returned from the Other Lands, the kind and loving and respectful young man his brother had known had become something else entirely.

  Maatakssi wept to discover this, and understood that the Above Ones, in their anger, had tricked him as payment for his own arrogance. For they had given him, as promised, one boon and one punishment, and yet they were indeed the same thing, as the old women said: a return to life for his brother Siinatssi.

  But the brother that left was not the one who came back.

  Life went on, as it does, and Siinatssi and Maatakssi became great chiefs, the fathers of a nation. They had many wives and sons and daughters, and sons’ sons and daughters’ daughters. In this place they had come to, fleeing the anger of Old Man, they made the People.

  For many upon many years, the People thrived, led by the two brothers. Maatakssi was a war chief, wily and strong in the ways of battle, fearless, leading the People to victory against all of their enemies of that time, the Cut-Noses and the Flat-Heads and the Hanging-Ears, many others. His war club had notches uncountable and his foes shivered to hear that the great Maatakssi was taking the field against them. Siinatssi, his brother, became a mighty shaman, heavy with medicine; he had come back from the Other Lands with powers that no other man possessed. Twice-Born Siinatssi, he was called, who could speak with the dead and the beasts and the spirits of the air. Siinatssi, who could bend the world to his will and do wondrous and terrible things.

  The two brothers were the leaders of a great People, whose numbers spread like the stars in the sky. From war band and medicine lodge they ruled the People and built a nation. But, alas, this was not enough for Siinatssi, who chafed that he must share glory with his perfidious brother, who had killed him those years ago. Siinatssi felt a burning in his heart that had been kindled during his stay in the Other Lands, which is a place of want and greed and ravenous, unending hunger for those who do not belong there. From time to time a spirit would escape from that cold place and find its way into a mortal; such a thing had happened to Siinatssi and what crouched there inside him now led him to betray his brother, Maatakssi, who had made him the man he now was.

  So, in the dead of one winter night, Siinatssi and his sorcerer kin bound poor Maatakssi, cutting the tendons of his legs and plucking out his eyes. They removed his tongue and carved the sigils into his flesh that would prevent his soul from finding rest, and then they raised their knives to pierce his heart and free his spirit to an eternity of hollow wandering, empty and starving. But Siinatssi, at the last, broken and mad though he was, could not condone the killing of his brother, the rape of his spirit, just as it may have been. He stopped his sons and nephews from their task, saying, “This is enough,” and then he leaned down to kiss his blinded, crippled, weeping brother. “May you have peace, Maatakssi,” he said, “but you will not have it with the People. They are mine now, and we will make a great thing without you, who killed me and made me who I am.”

  He reached down and took the pouch from around his brother’s neck where the bones, given to Maatakssi by their father, Old Man, were kept. “This, I take from you, brother,” he said. “I have taken your legs and your eyes and now I take your medicine. I take your name. All that you once were is my own, now. It is as if you have never existed. Now go, nameless worm, crawl to the west until you reach the great water. Do not turn back. I, Siinatssi, who have eaten the spirit of my once-brother, Maatakssi, say this to you.”

  And with that, he and his kin turned and left.

  Weeping bloody tears, Maatakssi crawled on hands and knees, blindly, towards the great water, for days that became weeks that became months. Ever westward, his flesh cut by rocks, his throat swollen and raw with the blood from his severed tongue, the hollows where he’d once had eyes burned by the sun. In the mornings, he sucked dew off the grass and dined on insects and the nodding heads of grasses; he drank from creeks and seeps if he found them, digging tubers and cresses from their banks. More often, he went hungry and thirsty, and wasted away to a skeletal shell of the man he once was, begging for a death that he could not find. Finally, Maatakssi could go no farther, and lay down to die. He closed his lids over empty sockets and waited for the Above Ones to claim him at last. Maatakssi had been well punished for his arrogance and the sin of killing his brother, the son of Old Man; he was now ready to greet the Above Ones with humility. These were his thoughts when he fell into sleep on that last day.

  Instead of the Above Ones coming to gather in his spirit, he was awoken by Raven, his old friend and betrayer.

  “Well, this is a thing, Maatakssi,” the bird said, squatting on his shoulder. “Truly you look like shit.”

  Maatakssi had no tongue and could not speak, he could only manage a thin croaking sound to express his anger at Raven, inviting him to have relations with himself, should the bird be able to manage it with such a tiny prick as he carried under those ratty black feathers.

  But, of course, Raven, being what he was, could well understand the croaking of Maatakssi, who sounded not unlike some of Raven’s wives. Raven laughed to see that there yet remained a spark of life in his young friend, the foolish two-leg walker who’d sought in his arrogance to trick the gods themselves. His laughter died, though, to see the bloody tears weeping down his face, once Maatakssi’s defiance had waned and he again merely awaited his release from the Above Ones.

  Sighing, knowing that he would one day regret it, Raven made a decision, then and there, and flew off to find Nihaat, his friend Spider, who watched over the tribe of the Big-Bellies. Nihaat was a cunning and powerful creature, who might be able to help young Maatakssi, fool though the boy was, but the cost would be high.

  For, even in the weeks and months since Maatakssi had been banished from his tribe, Raven had seen that the People, under the power of Siinatssi and Siinatssi alone, were already becomin
g a terrible thing.

  The cost would be high, but there was yet a chance that they could be saved, that Siinatssi himself could be drawn from his evil path, with the help of his brother. Raven looked upon poor eyeless Maatakssi, seeing the life he had built in this world, seeing the grief that would come to him, before the end.

  3.

  Bad Bird is droning on about Raven and the stupid old one, Maatakssi, always the old stories, but all Billy can think about is how much he hates these goddamn fucking cows.

  He hates the warm stink of them, their empty looks of bovine stupidity and, more than anything, hates the endless piles of steaming, mucky shit they produce. These piles of shit that, right now, as he does most days, he’s lumping into a heap to be taken away for fertilizer. Hour after hour, day after day, Billy Morgan, chief shit-mucker at the Montana State Hospital for the Insane at Warm Springs, bends and lifts and stretches and drops one hot, fragrant pile of cow dung after the other. An artisan, is what he is, he tells himself. A cowshit artiste.

  He’s made a sizable dent in the current pile so that now he can take a minute to light up a cigarette, to stretch his back and unclench his locked-up fingers from their grip around the splintery handled pitchfork. Roll his shoulder in its socket to loosen it up some, work the stiffness from the scar tissue that’s piled up inside the joint, where the glass had gone in. Ten years ago now, and still it hurt like a bastard, most days. Just luck, or Sol’s poor aim, maybe, that it had found his shoulder rather than his throat that day. Damn near killed him anyway, from the bleeding. It had cut deep, and gives him no end of grief now, still, scarred up as it is.

  Sol would have finished the job back then had big old John Tierney and his huge, horsey wife not come in and managed – just – between the two of them, to pull Sol off him, pin him to the ground long enough for Billy to get up and out of the mission church, streaming blood and hollering for help. The sheriff had thrown Sol in jail for a couple few days, just long enough for Billy to get far out of town – and best you not come back, son – told in no uncertain words to hightail it on out of Stevensville. Didn’t matter the circumstances or who was wrong or right, just go on, boy. And so he did, eventually fetching up back at the reservation with Bad Bird, wild-eyed with grief and the shock of it all, arm pinned to his side under the thick wrap of bandage around his shoulder and chest.