The door led into the shop’s small kitchen. Fran slammed it shut, listening to the dull impacts of Apraxis wasps against the wood. “What the hell is going on in this town? I do not approve!”
“No one does.” Jonathan stepped away from the door. “Fran, help me look for things to burn.”
“Oh, so I’m Fran again, am I? Not the wife-shooter? Because I was—” Her words were cut off by his mouth slamming down against hers, kissing her with all the intensity of a decade of frustrated waiting. After a split-second of shock, she kissed him back, just as fervently. Then she pulled away, slapped him across the face, and started rummaging through Miss Tapper’s shelves.
“I suppose I deserved that,” said Jonathan, grinning a little, and followed her.
In a matter of minutes, they had piled every flammable thing they could find in front of the door, liberally dousing them with lamp oil, kerosene, and cooking fat. “Johnny?”
“Yes?”
“We gonna die?”
“Oh, quite probably. Fran?”
“Yes?”
“Will you marry me?”
“Oh.” Fran blinked, and then smiled at him, radiant as the sun coming out. “Quite probably. Now light that match, city boy, and let’s have us a bonfire.”
The flames were just starting to consume the door when Jonathan heaved a chair through the kitchen window. He and Fran tumbled out into the street, landing in a heap amidst the broken glass and dirt. They heard footsteps.
It was really no surprise when they looked up to see the town sheriff standing there, gun drawn.
“I suppose we’re under arrest,” said Jonathan wearily.
“You suppose correct,” said the sheriff.
* * *
The town was small enough that there was only one jail cell, which they were allowed to share after they swore, again, that they were married. Jonathan had managed to beg a pair of tweezers and some gauze, insisting that it would be easier than waking the doctor. Fran sat on the bench in front of him, shirt bunched around her shoulders, wincing as he dug the tiny Apraxis eggs out of her flesh. The gunshot wound in her shoulder was already wrapped in a thick layer of bandages.
“What’n the hell happened back there?” she asked, as quietly as she could.
“That Tapper woman—whatever she was—she scrambled my head,” Jonathan said. “I remembered being with her for years. I remembered our wedding.”
“So how’d you break out of it?”
Jonathan extracted another egg from Fran’s arm. “You mustn’t laugh.”
“Johnny, right now, I’m not in a laughing mood.”
“I couldn’t remember a single mouse ritual having to do with her. That simply wasn’t believable. And then you were there, and you… I remembered the mice celebrating you.”
Fran laughed.
“You promised.”
“City boy, no one could hear that without laughing.” Fran grimaced as he removed another egg, and then asked, “So why did she scare the wasps so bad?”
“She manipulated my memory. Apraxis colonies are nothing but memory. To them, she must have seemed like the greatest predator the world had ever created. If she could do to them what she did to me…”
“Well, isn’t she a great neighbor? Remind me to hate her a little more.” Fran was quiet for a minute. “Did you mean that back there?”
“Yes. Although not until we get home. My parents would murder me if we got married in a Colorado jail.” Jonathan paused. “Assuming you meant your acceptance?”
“Only took you three years.”
“Touching as this is, I’d like you to leave.” They turned to see Eleanor Smith standing outside their cell, hands clutched primly in front of her. “Your bail’s been posted, and since it seems you burned down an unoccupied building, you’re free to go.”
“But what about—”
“Most of the town doesn’t remember her. I suspect I only do because I’ve been paying for music lessons.” Eleanor’s mouth pursed. “She never taught Betty a note. Now come collect your things—including your vermin—and go.”
“Why are you doing this?” asked Fran, pulling her shirt back into position. “It seems awfully nice of you.”
“I don’t like you,” said Eleanor. “I liked the wasps even less, and the ones that didn’t burn to death seem to have left. Good job. Now go.”
“Thank you,” said Jonathan. He stood, helping Fran to her feet. Eleanor turned, waving to someone. The sheriff appeared a moment later to unlock the cell.
Leaning on each other, battered, bloodied, and feeling oddly victorious, Jonathan and Frances limped out of the jail and into the blazing, wasp-free light of the Colorado dawn. There would be research to do, and the question of what the Tapper woman had been would need to be resolved, but for now, they were alive, they were free, and they were finally together.
Perhaps, Jonathan thought, trips west weren’t so bad after all.
He kept the thought to himself.
BOOKKEEPER, NARRATOR, GUNSLINGER
CHARLESYU
Lost Springs, Wyoming, 1890
It starts as a twitch.
Or that’s what I thought it was. At first.
A jitter in my thumb. Then it’s in my wrist, a jolt of energy running up my arm. All at once, too fast to know exactly where it had come from. There it is, I would start to think, but it was over before I had finished the thought, and there I was, gun in hand, smoke weeping from the barrel. Forty paces in front of me, a dead man in the dirt. He never had any idea it was coming. That made two of us: I was as surprised as he was.
* * *
I’d never been known as fast before, never been a man other men knew to steer clear of. Every now and then, a new gun would ride into town, preceded by his reputation, infamous for being mean and quick. And when these troublemakers came through, most of the other gunfighters, myself included, well, what can I say? There was a lot more of us looking down at our boots, or off toward the painted, bloodshot red mountains to the south. Anywhere but in the eyes. You could see them, just looking for it. Someone to step in front of them, someone to spit on the ground within fifty yards. Any excuse to start a fight, a fight that would end with one guy dead and the other guy moving on to the next town, his legend a little bit bigger.
But even these assholes knew who was who in our town. A lot of towns have a fastest gun. We had three: Fallon, Ratface, and Pete. But never mind their names, because it was Pete who looked like a rat. Fallon was the ugliest of the three. And Ratface, well, he was actually a good-looking fellow.
Fallon and Pete were friends, until they had a falling out over a woman, the only woman who ever took a liking to Pete and his rat-ugly face. Pete caught Fallon sniffing this woman’s wet undergarments, which wasn’t great, sure, but wasn’t that big a deal, really, except that the woman was still wearing them at the time.
“I’ll see you tomorrow at noon,” Pete said.
Fallon said, “Where?”
Pete said, “Are you kidding me? At the, uh, place. You know, the main drag. Oh God, why am I blanking.”
“Just think about something else,” Fallon said. “It will totally come to you if you think about something else.”
“Fallon what in the hell is wrong with you? Shut up.”
“I’m just saying. It totally works for me if I think about a cactus or a rock and then I remember what I was trying to…”
“Goddammit, Fallon, you ruined the moment. Just meet me in the place where guys like us go and draw our guns.”
And then Fallon started laughing at Pete, and Pete tried not to laugh, tried to do his best to stay angry, but that never works, and the harder Pete tried not to laugh, the more he laughed, until Pete didn’t want to kill Fallon anymore.
* * *
But then later that night, Pete was lying awake, alone, and looking up at the stars, and realizing he was sleeping close to his horse just for heat and the skin contact, and he didn’t want to be ugly anymore, but th
ere was no way around that, so he got his boots on and walked over to Fallon’s little shack on the edge of town and roused him out of bed with a gunshot to the moon.
“Pete?”
“Yeah.”
“What can I do for you? It’s an hour before dawn.”
“I don’t want this ugly face anymore.”
“Well, nothing much I can do about that. Your face is your face. Can’t change it.”
“I know. So instead, I’m going to do the next best thing.”
“What’s that, Pete?”
“Kill you.”
“Oh. That all?”
“I mean it. I’m going to kill you dead.”
“Now that’s just redundant.”
“In front of the whole town.”
“And dramatic.”
“If you’re done, Pete, I’m going back to sleep.”
* * *
Word spread fast. By sunrise, all the boys in town were placing bets on Fallon vs. Pete. This was a big deal for the town. Ratface was the fastest gun, not just here, but within a hundred and fifty miles, at least by most people’s accounts. But Fallon and Pete were clearly number two and three, in some order. And now we were going to find out what that order was. Two would probably be standing, and three would certainly be dead.
At about quarter to noon that day, people started lining the center of town, like they were waiting for a parade to come through. Mothers kept their small babies inside, but you could see the little heads peeking out from the windows, straining for a glimpse.
Pete and Fallon stood facing each other, forty paces apart, starting the stare-down.
“I reckon you got what’s coming to you, Fallon.”
“That’s how you talk, man? That’s now how you talk.”
“Yeah. Why? How do you talk?”
“Like a regular person.”
“What do you mean? I reckon that was an insult.”
“That’s what I mean. Reckon. Who says that? Stop saying reckon.”
“I can say reckon if I want. Reckon. Reckon. Ah reckon. Ah dew reckun.”
“Real mature, Pete.”
“Reckon, reckon, reckon.”
Then Ratface walked out from the saloon, whisky still in one hand, half a glass of beer in the other.
“You two idiots,” he said. “You both know I’m faster than either of you. How about this? Whoever wins, gets me next. So then you’ll both be dead, and I’ll be out a bullet. How do you like that? That’s what I thought. Now get your asses in the saloon and let’s play some cards.”
Fallon said, “Get out of the way, Ratface. This is between Pete and I.”
And that, to my great and everlasting surprise, is where I come into the story.
So there I am, look at me, I am standing on the porch of the general store, leaning on a post, arms crossed, just observing, like I always do. That’s my job. I guess you might call me the narrator of the town. I sell sundries, do a little bookkeeping on the side, and watch everyone come and go, keeping a mental ledger to go along with my ledgers full of numbers. The town and its people and their stories.
I’ve never had any problems with anyone, certainly not any of the gunslingers, including Fallon.
But for some reason, I just can’t let this one go.
Fallon says, “Excuse me?”
Ratface just starts laughing, like he knows I’m a dead man.
“Correct grammar is Pete and me. You said… Pete and I.”
“I know what I said, bookkeeper.”
“It’s a common mistake,” I say.
Pete says, “Come on, Fallon, he doesn’t mean any harm.”
But it’s already too late. Pete vs. Fallon has been cancelled, and replaced with the new matchup: Fallon vs. me.
* * *
By noon the next day, people are lining up again, but this time there aren’t any bets being taken. People either feel sorry for me, or think I am incredibly stupid. Or both. I guess those things aren’t mutually exclusive.
We stand face to face, about forty paces. We do the stare-down thing. Fallon stares hard. He has a good gunslinger stare. What I do is more like squinting. It is bright and hot and dry and dusty, so you can imagine I am squinting pretty hard.
I close my eyes for a second, half wishing it could just be over with, wishing I could lie there in the dirt like the dumbass I was, half feeling like I deserve this, for being so stupid as to be giving unsolicited grammar lessons to someone like Fallon, someone with the dangerous combination of being both a prick and really quick on the draw.
And then this is what happens, in some order. I will tell you what order it feels like it happens, which is not necessarily the order in which it actually happens:
I hear a scream.
I hear everyone in town gasp all at once.
I open my eyes.
I look down and see my gun in my hand, smoke curling out of the barrel.
I come to understand that Fallon has screamed.
My brain figures out what my body has known for a while: my hand has fired my gun. My bullet has found a resting place between Fallon’s dark eyebrows.
I hear another scream, this one escaping from my own mouth, as I realize there is a dead guy. And I am not him.
* * *
It’s later, over a beer, that Ratface tells me Fallon never screamed.
“Think about that,” he says.
It’s even later that night, while drifting off to sleep, that I realize Fallon did scream. Just not out loud.
* * *
It isn’t long before guys start showing up.
Sometimes they ride in alone, sometimes in twos and threes. They don’t want Pete. He’s small potatoes now.
And even though everyone still figures Ratface to be the guy to beat, they don’t want him either.
They want to test themselves against me. The guy who shoots with his eyes closed.
It’s the same thing, every time. Stranger rides into town. Looking for trouble. Can’t find it—and I’m certainly not going to give it to him.
I stop going to the saloon, stop going anywhere I don’t need to go. But sooner or later, they all find me anyway. It might take a day or two, but eventually they find a way to cross paths with me.
I continue to work at the general store. Which makes it easier on them—they just wait for me there until I close up shop for the day, catch me on my way home.
Their first reaction is usually relief. Then a smirk. I don’t much look the part of town gunslinger. Killing me, they figure, is going to be easier than they thought.
So then I even stop going to the store. Doesn’t matter—they come to my home, make up some story, some imagined slight, something an uncle of mine did to them in the past, just whatever it takes to start a fight, and then, the next day at noon, there we are, stranger dead, me with my eyes closed, trying to remember how I did that.
This can’t possibly last, I think. And so everyone else in town privately agrees. You don’t just get this fast overnight. You are born with it, or you aren’t, and I wasn’t. Bad eyes, bad hands, bad reflexes. There’s a reason I’m the town bookkeeper.
So if not skill, then it must be some kind of luck. Some kind of quirk that happens, once a century, in some small town, some coin-flipping in the cosmos, coming up heads a hundred times in a row. There is just no way I could have killed all these killers, these bad men, men who can shoot two holes in a silver dollar before an average man has his gun drawn.
It’s the twitch. The jitter in my thumb, the jolt running from my wrist to my shoulder. It’s just some freak of my body, gaining some kind of ability, a hidden gift that just happens to be manifesting itself now. It has to be, right?
Except, maybe. It isn’t. Except, maybe it has something to do with the fact that I close my eyes, something to do with that scream I heard from Fallon, a scream that didn’t come from his mouth. Came from somewhere inside of him. Unless, maybe, it isn’t my body at all that was fast.
But that�
�s just hooey. This can’t last. Any day now, I’ll get killed. Any day now, some really fast gun will ride into town, and put a bullet in me, and end this lucky streak once and for all. That’s what everyone in town thinks. I can hear them thinking it. At least that’s what it feels like.
* * *
I see Ratface once in a while. He’s usually at the bar, seeming bored by it all, and possibly, and I can’t quite believe I’m even saying it, possibly a bit envious of me. Of me. The bookkeeper. But he’s always been good. Or if not good, decent. At least to me. So I give him a wide berth, while he watches me with curiously intense interest.
* * *
And then, Deke comes riding into town. He doesn’t even try to pretend he’s come for any reason other than to kill me. He rides straight up to the store. It’s early in the morning, I’ve just opened up shop, and he walks in, draws his gun, and leads me out to the place where I killed all those other men, just like I’m going to have to kill Deke.
Maybe this time will be the time. Everything feels wrong. I’m standing with the early morning sun in my eyes. I haven’t even fully woken up yet. And the night before, I drank myself to sleep, thinking of all the men I have killed, men who’d asked for their own death sentences by wanting to draw against me. My legs felt heavy, my whole body was sluggish.
Deke did the staring thing. And I am thinking, what is with the gunslinger staring thing? Why do we have to do this? And my mind sort of drifts off and maybe it’s because I am lost in thought that I don’t close my eyes this time, but for whatever reason, I have my eyes wide open which means I am looking at Deke’s butt-ugly face and I see exactly how it happens.
“Now,” Deke says.
Don’t do it, I say.
Except when I say it, Deke hears it, in his head, hears me, responding to him, even though he hasn’t said a word, and although his hand is reaching for his gun, the sound of my voice inside of his head freezes Deke, just like three dozen others before him, freezes him in terror at the feeling of someone else inside his head, and in that instant, my gun is out, my finger already squeezing the trigger.
* * *
After Deke, it just gets worse.
On the one hand, I have become the town hero. The de facto sheriff. Can I say de facto, in this kind of story? Aw, hell with it. It’s my story. I can say it if I want to. Women come to me every week, asking me to kill their husbands for beating them. Bad men come through town looking to exact revenge, and I am the designated guardian of our population. I have a cheering section. I have fans. Hell, I have a job.
Dead Man’s Hand Page 10