The Rider hesitated as the big guard took a hold of his arm. The man’s yellow gold smile disappeared.
“Are you gonna be a problem, 1748?”
The Rider’s eyes went to the guard’s rifle, and to the thick, callused hand that clutched it, the worn, scabbed over knuckles.
“No sir,” he said.
The guard pulled him over to a corner of the room and slung him into a rickety chair, where a skinny man with bad teeth attacked his thick hair and beard with shears and a razor, starting with his scared payot curls.
“This one’s sure got some pretty locks, don’t he, O’Doyle?” said the barber.
“Ain’t they though?” O’Doyle snickered.
The Rider watched years of curling black hair fall away to the dusty floor between his feet. In his sect, it was considered tantamount to sin to shave one’s beard away in this manner. The chin hair was akin to holiness, and some said it could be offered to protect the dead in Sheol. Shaving was only permitted to atone for grievous sin. Well, perhaps he had sinned. He sinned in his lust for Nehema, sinned in bringing so many innocents into the path of Adon and Lilith’s evil, sinned in his own hubris and doubt of the Lord.
Despite the stifling air, he managed to feel cool on his naked face and the skin of his shorn scalp, but he felt more ashamed than if he had been stripped of his clothes.
Which of course, is what came next.
O’Doyle yanked him to his feet and led him to a corner of the room where a rusty iron tub sat, and a skinny convict waited nearby with three wooden buckets of water. The chains were removed from his wrists. At gunpoint he was forced to shrug out of his boots and trousers. He paused in his shirttails. Books had taken his pistol, knife, and all his talismans upon his arrest, but he had not taken away his tallit katan.
As he stood fingering one of the blue and white tzitzit fringes, O’Doyle cleared his throat.
“Don’t be bashful, 1748. You can’t take no bath in your shirt.”
The Rider slowly undid his shirt and stood only in the small, frayed prayer apron and undershirt now.
Some of the other guards and officials sauntered over.
“Say Croc,” said one. “You been strippin’ this one down for awhile now. We come over to make sure nothin’ lascivious is goin’ on.”
“He’s got more unmentionables than the Queen of England,” said the yellow toothed Croc O’Doyle, spitting on the floor through the gap in his two front teeth.
“What’s that little bib he’s wearin?” said another.
“How’m I to know that, Murphy?” O’Doyle said, shrugging. “There he stands. Ask ‘im yourself.”
But Murphy didn’t ask.
It was the four fringed prayer apron his own mother had sewed for him as a boy. The 613 blue and white knots in each of the four tzitzit tassels had been woven together painstakingly by his father. It occurred to him now that since the onager had departed with all his worldly goods strapped to the pack saddle, this was all he had left of his parents. It was frayed and mended. Faded bloodstains were still just barely visible, and the Rider himself had patched a bullet hole in it. He had held onto the ragged thing long past its worth, but it was all he had of them.
“Take that bib off, 1748,” Croc ordered.
The Rider bent his head and kissed each of the fringes. It was a ritual of his own devising. This was just linen and wool. Nothing more. But he felt his eyes swell, along with something that worked its way up from the middle of his chest to the back of his throat: a sob, which he must not let these hard men perceive. He swallowed it, and slid the little apron over his head. He didn’t drop it in the pile with the other clothes, but folded it and laid it gently on top.
He slid the undershirt off then, and stood naked. Some of them jeered and whistled, most in raucous humor, but a few with something genuine and unsettling behind it.
“Well, he’s a Jew alright,” one of them muttered.
“Not just any Jew,” Croc O’Doyle said, almost admiringly. “Boys, this here is the Killer Jew of Varruga Tanks.”
“This one?”
“No other. A real son of Cain.”
“He don’t look like much.”
“He has been through the wringer a few times,” said another. “Where’d you get all them marks?”
The Rider said nothing. His hands and face were covered with miniscule scars, and his body was marred by old knife and bullet wounds. He had suffered a good long while thanks to the forces of Lilith having learned his true name and rendered his protective charms useless for a time, but he had recovered some of his weight and muscle since then. Still, bereft of his hair and clothing, he must’ve looked like a shorn sheep to these men. Or a wet rat.
“Ain’t too talkative,” said the man who had patiently waited for an answer to his question.
“He only needs to talk to Mister Laird,” said O’Doyle. “Alright,” he said then, motioning with the barrel of his rifle toward the tub as another prisoner came forward with a push broom and began to gather the Rider’s hair. “Step into the tub.”
The Rider shuffled, covering his privates with his hands, and stepped into the iron tub.
One of the officials tossed a bar of lye at him and he caught it.
“You only get one bath a week, so make it count,” said O’Doyle. He nodded, and a man picked up a bucket of water and poured it over his head. It was frigid water from the stone tank no doubt, and he shivered from the shock of it, but obediently worked the bar into a lather and washed himself as best he could. He was treated to two more buckets of water before he was ordered out of the tub. He stumbled, shivering and wiping soap from his eyes.
“You’ll dry out quick enough out there in a minute,” said O’Doyle.
Martins, the man from the counter, ran over with a folded black and white striped cotton shirt and two pairs of pants and underwear and pushed it all into the Rider’s hands. He pulled on the undergarments, then slipped the shirt over his head and drew the trousers on. He separated a bundle of black wool socks and drew them over his feet.
He looked for his cavalry boots, but they were gone. The officials had picked through his clothes while he bathed.
A pair of cheap shoes sans laces were thrown at him, and he stooped and pulled them on as well as he could manage. They were too small and bunched up his toes.
Finally he was handed a shapeless cap, two combs, two towels, two sheets, and two gray pillowcases.
“Alright, 1748,” said O’Doyle. “Let me show you to your new accommodations.”
O’Doyle led him back out into the yard. The sun scorched the crown of his bald head, and he set the cap on against it. He was marched across the stones to a guarded iron gate leading into the granite cellblock.
Two armed guards stood at the gate. One unlocked the heavy door, and the other accompanied them inside, swinging a ring of clinking keys as he walked.
It was cooler inside, and he blinked to adjust his sun blinded eyes to the dimness here.
“Whatcha got here, Croc?”
“The Killer Jew of Varruga Tanks,” said O’Doyle.
“The what of what?” the jailer chuckled.
O’Doyle laughed.
The inner hallway was lined with twenty or so crosshatched iron doors. Thin faces peered at him from the dark depths of these as he walked by. He was stopped finally before one of the cells, and the jailer fit a key into the lock and swung it open.
“I thought Mister Laird wanted to see me?” the Rider said to O’Doyle.
“When he’s ready,” said O’Doyle, motioning with the rifle for him to enter.
The Rider went inside, cockroaches scurrying out of his path. A dank, outhouse smell met his nose.
He was not alone. There were two sets of flaking green wooden bunks with tick mattresses stacked three high, and five other men occupied them. The two on the bottom sat with their legs swung out, apparently playing cards for cigarettes. Of the two in the middle bunks, one, a Mexican, lay with his shaggy
head propped on one elbow, watching the game, and the other lay sleeping, as did the fifth man on the top bunk above the Mexican.
All the conscious prisoners glanced up as he entered, the dim light from the corridor sifting through the cage door appearing as squares across their unshaven faces. He didn’t see how they could possibly see enough to play cards.
The door slammed shut, and the two guards walked off without a word.
The Rider stood as the two men went back to their game, the cards slapping and sweeping across the floor stone floor.
“Buenas dias,” said the Mexican, his dark eyes glittering.
The Rider nodded.
“Shit up a stick,” one of the card players cussed, as the other man laid down his hand and then began plucking the rolled up cigarettes from the center of the floor.
The loser was skinnier and more angular than the rest. He had dirty blonde hair and his cap was on his bony knee. He stuck out his hand without looking at the Rider.
“Jim Tolliver,” he said. “Assault and Seduction with the promise of marriage.”
“What?” said the Rider.
Tolliver looked at him, grinning.
“Eighty days for Assault and Seduction with the promise of marriage. The assault was on her brother, though I maintain he assaulted me first. How’s about yourself?”
“I killed a woman,” the Rider said quietly, not taking the man’s hand.
Neither the crime nor the lack of a handshake seemed to perturb Tolliver.
“You and Jaimenacho oughta get along swimmingly. He’s killed three.”
The Rider looked at the Mexican.
“They was sisters,” said Jaimenacho, by way of explanation.
“Parker here is servin’ time for obstructin’ the railroad and manslaughterin.’”
The other cardplayer looked up from sorting his winnings. He was an older man, his hair gray around the edges. He was missing some teeth.
“Goddamn railroad,” was all he said on the matter.
“My upstairs neighbor here,” whispered Tolliver, nodding to the sleeping form above his head. “That’s Anson, our resident burglar and robber. He drew a year for shootin’ a peace officer in the elbow.”
“You talk too goddamn much, Tolliver,” Anson mumbled into his pillow.
“What about him?” the Rider asked, looking at the other sleeping man on the top bunk.
“Him? Oh that’s Jethro. He’s innocent,” Tolliver grinned. “He says he don’t belong here at all. Spent his first two days here in the crazy hole telling everybody all about it. Swore he didn’t even know how he got to Arizona. I tell you, I’d like a swallow of whatever he had.”
Jaimenacho snickered and Parker laughed wheezily through the gaps in his teeth and gathered up the cards.
“They caught him drunk, tryin’ to buy a ticket to Californey with somebody else’s check at the train station,” said Parker. The mention of trains fouled his mood then, and he spat on the floor.
“Well it looks like you get the top bunk, pard,” Tolliver said, angling his thumb upward. “Mind you don’t step on neither of us gettin’ up to use the piss pot in the middle of the night.”
The Rider looked over to a corner of the room where a tin pot sat beneath a halo of flies, circling like miniature buzzards. He turned and threw his pillow and sheets on the top bunk. The sound made the man sleeping on the third tier bunk across the room stir.
“Put your socks over your shoes at night and you’ll keep the roaches and scorpions from curlin’ up in ‘em,” Tolliver said. “We all work the stone quarry, so I imagine you will too, unless you can do something special.”
“What do you mean?” the Rider asked.
“Like Jethro there. He’s a tailor. Sews lacey stuff for the Yuma ladies that come to the flea market every Sunday, so they spare his precious hands the rest of the week.”
“That ain’t exactly so,” said Parker. “They do put him to work patchin’ up britches and sewin’ shirts in the Yard Office.”
“Oh right,” said Tolliver, rolling his eyes. “Hard labor.”
The Rider looked around the cell. It was actually a strap iron cage encased in granite and adobe. No digging through that. The only way out was the locked door. There was a single thick ring set into the middle of the floor inexplicably. The bunks creaked and groaned when he mounted, the green painted wood dry and flaking. With the dungeon-like acoustics of the outer corridor, any movement at all would likely echo up and down the whole cellblock in the still of the night.
“Talk about hard labor,” said Parker. “I wonder when Captain Meder’s comin’ back already. I’m too old to be out on the damn rockpile, and I’m tired of getting’ woke up for Laird’s midnight jobs.”
“Laird is a bastard alright,” Tolliver said. “Man’s got so many sidelines goin,’ hirin’ us out to them cheap bastards down in Yuma, puttin’ us to work in the middle of the night on his schemes, he ought to be in here with us. But, he says everybody works. ‘Cept for the Incorrigbles. And Jethro there.”
“Capitan Meder, he is taking in the California sun,” said Jaimenacho, pillowing his head with his hands and staring at the sagging bottom of Jethro’s bunk with a smile. “Dipping his toes in the cool ocean. If I was him, I’d never come back here to this goddamned place.”
The Rider reached his cot and grimaced. The tick mattress was crawling with bugs. He flicked a few away into the dark corners of the cell, then took his pillow back in disgust and shook it out, snapping the case.
“Got some friends up there waitin’ for you?” Parker sneered. “Talk to Jethro when he wakes up. We got us a special method for dealin’ with them in here.”
“I’m awake now,” Jethro said to the wall he was facing.
The Rider froze in mid-descent from the bunk at the sound of Jethro’s voice. It was jarringly familiar.
“I’m supposed to sleep with all your schmoozing?” He turned on his side and faced them. “Feh! Like a bunch of yentas, you shtunks are.”
The Rider stared at the man on the bunk, and an involuntary tremor began deep in his chest and spread outwards into his extremities. Jethro. It wasn’t an uncommon name, but he had heard it so recently. How had it escape his attention now?
That curly reddish beard, the thick eyebrows, flecked with grey, the high, wrinkled forehead, swelling with knowledge, he had always thought of it. The greenish eyes, even the patient, indulgent pedagoguery of his thin lipped smile as he swung his lean legs out of the bunk and produced a little bottle from his left shoe.
“Arsenic,” he said, still smiling. “I swiped it from the commissary. They use it to kill the rats. Here. Just sprinkle a little bit on your cot during the day and shake out your sheets before you lay down.”
He smiled conspiratorially and tossed the little bottle to the Rider, but the Rider made no move to catch it. It bounced off his chest and tinkled across the floor loudly.
Jethro.
“Hey,” said Parker, snatching it. “Be careful with this stuff. We only got a little bit.”
“Oye, what’s the matter with him?” said Jaimenacho.
How long had he searched the earth? How many years? To find him here. Here, in this dungeon, a million miles from anywhere, smiling at him as if nothing had ever passed between them.
Jethro Auspitz. The name Kabede had read beside Adon’s in the Order’s Book of Life.
To find Adon here!
He closed the distance between them in no time. He planted his foot on Parker’s bunk and in one lunge vaulted up and grabbed Adon by the collar of his shirt. He had always been a frail looking man, but his frailty had not bespoken the inner power he had commanded. He was older, and that mirage of frailty had grown, but there was no question.
This was Adon!
The older man registered a verbal squawk of surprise as the Rider dragged him from the top bunk and turned, smashing him face first into the floor, ignoring the agony it shot through his taped fingers.
The othe
r prisoners leapt away in shock as the Rider straddled the older man and gripped the curling short hair at the back of his head, pulling his bloodied face up from the floor and wrenching it back so his blinking eyes could see him.
“Don’t you recognize me, rabbi?” he snarled in Aramaic, and spat into the man’s face.
“Wh-who? Wh-what?” Adon spluttered in English, lips dribbling blood.
The Rider drove his face into the iron ring. Something cracked, and three broken teeth skittered across the floor.
The Rider pulled the head back to look into the mashed and bloody face again.
Adon’s eyes were rolling, his battered mouth opening and closing, drooling blood.
The Rider faltered.
In that moment the Mexican, Jaimenacho, sprang from the bunk and tackled the Rider off the prone man. The Rider fell under him, scraps of Adon’s hair gripped between his fingers, as Tolliver ran to the door and pressed his face through it and began hollering for the guards.
“Help! Help! The new fella’s killin’ Jethro!”
The Rider bucked and fought to break Jaimenacho’s grip. The Mexican was strong, and sought to drag him to the back of the cell, and so he kicked at the senseless Adon, catching him in the ear with the heel of his shoe, rocking his head back.
“Hah? Don’t you recognize me? Hah? Moser!”
In their struggle, the chamber pot overturned, drenching them both with filth and urine.
The Mexican cursed. It was too much for him. He flung the Rider into a corner and stood up, shaking his arms in disgust, peeling his dripping shirt off.
The Rider hit the hard wall and took a moment to shake coherence back into his dashed skull.
In that moment the footsteps that had been pounding down the cellblock since Tolliver began yelling came to a shuffling halt in front of their cell. There was a clank and the door groaned open, Tolliver jumping back and flattening himself against the wall with his hands raised as Croc O’Doyle came charging in with his rifle.
The Rider leapt at Adon again and O’Doyle checked him in mid air with the barrel of Winchester across his face. The front sight had apparently been filed, for it opened up a tear on his left cheek. The impact and the hot blood settled his rage momentarily, and he felt himself dragged out of the cell by his ankles.
Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel Page 31