The Six-Gun Tarot

by R. S. Belcher

  The rumbling died out, like receding thunder, and the room quieted. The light strengthened and returned. Everything was still again. Harry rose slowly with a groan. He knocked the small rocks, dust and sand off his back and patted himself down. Nothing felt broken, but he was still going to be sore as blazes tomorrow.

  The tunnel back to the ladder looked mostly clear and the relics all seemed to be none the worse for the ordeal. Harry reached down to pick up the golden plates. He almost dropped them again in surprise. The sealed plates, those that were denied to Joseph Smith’s view by the angel Moroni, were now open, their engraved alien formulae glowing out of the metal pages.

  Harry Pratt cradled the book close in both arms as its angelic fire fluttered across the plates. He had learned the lessons of his father well, and he knew. The sealed portions of the plates were a message, a revelation from God Almighty from the beginning of the world … to the ending thereof.

  She took the news better than most, Mutt thought. To have someone show up on your doorstep in the middle of the night to tell you your husband was murdered in an alley not too far from a den of ill repute, for all of that, Maude Stapleton stayed clam, held in the tears, even though her eyes grew wet.

  “I’m sorry to be telling you this,” Mutt said. She had asked him in and he stood in her doorway, uncertain how to behave inside a home like this. Even in her grief, Maude Stapleton was gracious.

  “Please, Deputy, have a seat. Would you care for something?”

  She sensed his discomfort; that was rare in Mutt’s experience. That she cared rarer still.

  “Naw,” he said, taking a seat at the dinner table. “I mean, no, ma’m.”

  She almost smiled. Almost. The news had struck her, like a blow to the stomach, but there was a numbness that had already been there, filling her up. Since she had seen Arthur leave with the Bible and the gun. An instinct that said, This is all. It is the end of this story. She was shocked at how little love was left in her for Arthur, but it was still there, clawing for release for tears and regrets. She denied it for now. Later.

  Maude sat across the table from Mutt, still dressed for the day. She had been waiting up, he noted. She folded her hands and laid them on the smooth wood.

  “I’m, uh, sorry for your loss.” That much was true. He thought about saying something nice about the departed, but he honestly couldn’t think of anything, and he’d be damned if he’d lie for a dead banker, especially to this woman.

  “That’s a kindness, Deputy,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Mrs. Stapleton, there are some things my boss needs to know to find out who done this to your husband. I’m sorry to be doing this now but—”

  “I understand, Deputy,” she said softly.

  Mutt saw her steel herself. Hell of a woman. He tried to focus on his reason for being here, but Maude Stapleton kept getting in his way. He felt stupid and wrong for what he was feeling about the grieving widow.

  “Um … When was the last time you saw your husband?”

  This man, this deputy, Maude sensed something in him. The same thing she had felt during the altercation at Shultz’s store the other day. Mutt was aware, more so than most human beings, more so than any other man she had ever met. It was fascinating and frightening.

  She was out of practice at the arts of deception; she could hide well enough from the lazy senses of most people, cloak herself in their preconceptions, their biases, the emotional and perceptional blind spots Gran had taught her to exploit. This man, he was different.

  “Tonight,” she said. “He was late to dinner, but that is not unusual. He came in about six, when I was clearing off the table. Constance was washing up.”

  “Constance, that’s you and Mr. Stapleton’s daughter? She was with you the other day in front of Shultz’s.”

  “Yes. She was born back in Charleston. We had her only a few years after we were married. I met him when I was twenty. He was a clerk for my family’s attorneys when we met. He was … very handsome. Very smart and ambitious. Arthur was a very devoted father to Constance. She … He…”

  Maude lowered her head and focused on the grain of the table. The pain in her gut welled up into her heart. Arthur, cupping her chin, looking at her like she was the only person in the universe. Kissing in the rain: wet and cold and hot hungry mouths breathing love into each other. The sanctum of their bed. Whispering, laughing, touching, pleasure and secrets in the darkness. The fighting. The lies. The betrayals. Intimacy dying behind fortresses of guarded pain. The years grinding, rushing on. Love turning to tolerance turning to hate turning to fatigued indifference.

  “That’s a lie,” she said. “What I just told you. It’s a lie. Arthur was a terrible father. He tried, but he was simply too selfish, too angry, too short with her. I married him because I wanted a daughter and I thought I could control him. I couldn’t and I couldn’t control myself. I … changed. I forgot myself. I became what everyone wanted me to be, expected me to be. I really don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

  Mutt ran his fingers along the grain of the wood table. He looked up to match her gaze.

  “Maybe because I knew you were lying,” he said. “Most people do it without even thinking—lying. Usually they half-believe it themselves. You do it real good, real believable-like. I can see you trying to lie to me, pretty sure to yourself. But it ain’t in you, ain’t in your heart. You’re true.”

  “I haven’t felt true to anything in a very, very long time,” she said. “Every time I thought I knew something true, I let it slip away from muh … from … me.”

  The steel cracked in her. She started to sob, quietly shaking. Where once she could have controlled her heart’s beating, controlled her tear ducts, the dilation of her pupils, now her body betrayed her, her emotions were a storm and she suddenly felt very, very small. Too small to hold this anymore.

  “Damn it,” she said.

  Mutt rose and moved to her. She stood, trying to marshal her control. She waved for him to remain in his seat, but it was a feeble gesture. All of her strength was engaged in the battle within. He gently placed his hand on her shoulder and she jumped, as if shocked. Her eyes fell into his and he saw her pain, wet and raw in there.

  “Ain’t too many of us true folk around,” he said softly. “It’s hard to live in a world where you got to hide who you are away, even from yourself, just to survive the lies of this place.”

  They were close. He saw the small wrinkles around her eyes, at the corners of her red mouth.

  “Yes,” she said. “You get sick of hiding.”

  Close, so close he could taste her tears in the air between their lips.

  “Eats you up,” he said.

  He gave himself to the moment, pushing aside his mind and listening to his blood.

  Closer.

  Maude was awash in her pain, drowning in it. Nothing felt real, like a walking dream. The hurt was deep and layered, subtle and raging, like a symphony-storm. Mourning for Arthur, feeling the loss of the only man she had ever called lover, ever borne a child with, the only man she had ever served, and at times enjoyed serving.

  Mixed in was the resentment, the anger at the years of compromises she had made—some because of him directly, many she had to swallow as her own choices. The disconnect between the idea, the emotion and the reality of who they were, who they became together. It was like being cut and feeling a vague thrill of pleasure from it but knowing too well that the pain would rise preeminent and eclipse all other feelings. And leave a scar. Another scar.

  When she had been with Gran she had puzzled over how any woman would allow herself to become the property of any man.

  “It’s in the nature of us,” Gran had told her. “To serve, to please. Just as it is in their nature to try to control the things they can’t. You may find one day, Maude, that the heart is a fierce beast, it serves only its own call. You’ll discover that for all the power you are learning, for all the control you have over yourself, it matters not
a tinker’s cuss to love.

  “I loved my dear husband, Jack very much, even though he was a right lazy, ruthless bastard of a pirate, who didn’t treat me as was proper. And I could have killed him without a thought. But I loved him, and he owned me and I let him.”

  “I don’t understand, Gran,” she had said.

  “Love makes slaves out of all of us,” she said. “And it sets us free.”

  Married to the pain of Arthur’s loss was a deeper, more personal agony. The realization of how much of herself she had given away over the years to the lie that she had become—how much power she had given up to be wife, mother, servant, and how, instead of making those things a natural breathing whole in her, she had locked away her brightest core, her truest, best self, and hidden in the ramshackle debris of the lie.

  And now the lie was naked, exposed, vulnerable, to this virtual stranger, this dark-eyed outcast, held up for her to see. Arthur was dead. The wife was dead with him.

  What exactly was she now? She remembered a glowing, golden time when she had known, bone deep, blood deep, her name, her face. Now it was all shadow. She saw something in the black mirrors of Mutt’s eyes that spoke to the deepest parts of her, calling to her. She moved toward it. Feeling, not thinking.

  Closer.

  The thing that reminded her who she was also reminded her of who she wasn’t. It was clear and silver and in it she felt truth and rightness.

  “No,” she said. “Please, no.”

  Mutt felt the old urges, the power drumming in his temples, his chest, his loins. He was so hungry, so wanting this woman. He could have her—he knew her protests were weak and wrapped in a lifetime of repression, a lifetime of groveling to the white man’s pompous God. His need gave him power, gave him right. Reason was a weakness, a blind to hide behind when you were too scared, too timid, to do what you wanted, what your instincts told you was the way. Take her, now, on the table. Lift up her skirt; bite her flesh. In seconds she will join you in the dance. You simply have to push aside her reluctance, her fear.

  Her humanity, her will.

  No. The man inside him said it again to the snarling cur. No. Her voice gave him strength.

  He stepped away and tried to draw in cool air, air without her sweet, musky scent.

  “I’m … I didn’t mean—” Words, language, were stone blocks that fell out of his mouth and shattered on the floor. He was so far gone he was almost forgetting human speech. He backed away from her, shaking his head.

  “It’s all right; you’re … I mean, I’m fine…,” she said, flushed. “What do I call you? I mean other than ‘Deputy’ and that horrid nickname they gave you?”

  “It’s all the name I’ve got,” he said, recovering. His breathing was slowing, his blood was cooling and he was master of his flesh again. “Got no people. My mother’s folks, the We’lmelti, they threw me and my mother out when I was a baby. Tried to kill us both. White folks don’t try to kill you as much; they just hate you, use you, ignore you if you’re lucky. I’ll take my chances with them. Mutt’s the only name I know. Not a sad thing, not who I am—just words.”

  Maude nodded. “It’s what we do that names us,” she said. “Nothing else.”

  They stared at each other for a time, silent.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “No, ma’am, thank you,” he said.

  “Maude,” she said. “Not ‘ma’am.’ Maude.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Maude.”

  She wrapped her arms around herself, exhaled. “I saw my husband around six o’clock tonight. He was upset, scared. He had been drinking. He drank more. He wouldn’t tell me why he was upset. Then Mr. Bick showed up.”

  “Bick, here?”

  “Yes, they spoke on the porch. Arthur said something about some papers … a deed. Arthur said he knew about the others … other deeds? Bick left. He never raised his voice, but when Arthur came back in, he was more frightened than I’ve ever seen him. He took his pistol and he left a little after seven. He said good-bye and kissed me on the cheek.”

  She paused, frowned.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “He took his Bible with him,” she said. “Arthur never even touched it except on the Sabbath. It was very strange. I think he wanted it for protection. He said something about going to see a Chinaman.”

  Another awkward pause passed between them. It didn’t feel like a pause, though. It felt like the air between them was full of something powerful, huge and brooding, like the anticipation before a thunderstorm.

  “Much obliged,” Mutt finally said, walking to and opening the door. The cold air off the desert was a blessing to him. “I’m powerful sorry again for what happened to your husband, Mrs. Stapl—Maude. The sheriff will check in with you on—”

  “Mutt.” She said it in a way that he had never heard before. It didn’t sound like a cuss, or a joke. “That’s the first lie you’ve ever told me,” she said. “Just now. You didn’t care much for Arthur and you’re not too terribly upset he’s dead, are you?”

  “No,” Mutt said. “But if it hurts you, then I am sorry for it. And that is true.”

  The ghost of a smile crossed her face. “I’ve had a lot of men lie to me in my life, Mutt. I don’t need another one. It would be nice to have one I can count on for straight talk. Especially now.”

  He tried to think of something fancy to say, like what Jonathan might say to a girl, but there was nothing. “If it helps any, I swear to you, I’ll do my damnedest for it to be the last lie I ever tell you,” he said. “G’night, Maude.”

  He shut the door and tried to reorient himself to a world without her in it. This was crazy, guilty, wrong. He was turned all about by her. The senses he lived by, that kept him alive, were his enemies when it came to this woman. He breathed in cold air and tried to ignore them.

  He almost didn’t hear the intruder until he was almost on top of him. Mutt spun, drawing his gun fluidly and brandishing it at the dark street.

  “Put that silly thing away,” the coyote said. “You know it can’t hurt any of us.”

  “What the hell do you want?” Mutt said, holstering the gun as he began to walk toward the jailhouse.

  “Well, that’s a fine way to greet your brother,” the coyote said. “Especially after all those pretty manners you spread all over the widow back there.”

  “You stay away from her!”

  “I’ll try, but it sure will be hard. You already know that, don’t you? I swear, Mutt, I can smell the stink of her want all the way down the street. She’s been abused, neglected and ignored. Even reeking of grief, she still wanted you to comfort her. She’s ripe, Bro. Why didn’t you close the deal?”

  “Shut up. Don’t talk about her like that. Did Dad send you?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did. He said to tell you it was time to stop poutin’ and playing at being a man and get the blazes out of this town, now.”

  Mutt stopped walking. He turned and regarded the animal.

  “What do you know?”

  “What do I know? Blazes, Mutt, you‘ve been wearing that skin too damn long! I don’t need to know anything. Any fool with good instincts and a decent set of senses can feel it coming. Like a rattler, shaking the air to tell you to back the hell off. Dad says it’s got to do with their God, the white men’s. That and something … something old, older than the shining people, older than Dad, which made even him tuck his tail.”

  Mutt picked up his pace, heading across Main Street, toward the old stone well.

  “Git,” he said. “I ain’t going nowhere. I’ve got friends in this town and I don’t intend to up and leave ’em.”

  “Friends?” The coyote laughed. “I saw what you got here, Brother. This is epic! You’ve done gone and took a shine to her, just like a real, honest-to-goodness, stupid human being! Wait till Dad hears this one; he’ll bust a gut!”

  “Git,” Mutt’s diminishing back said. “Last time I tell you nice.”

  “Suit yourse
lf, but Dad says this town, your friends, all of it, ain’t going to be here in a few days! Only safe place to be is in the desert with us, with him.”

  The coyote laughed and loped down the side street, back toward the open desert.

  “You see that, floating there? It is part of her ear, yes?” Auggie said to Clay Turlough. The two men were in Auggie’s storeroom examining Gerta’s condition in her tank.

  “Earlobe,” Clay said. “I think.”

  “Well, gosh-darn-it-all, Clayton,” Auggie sputtered, “it is supposed to be on her ear, yes! Not floating at the top of the tank, like a dead goldfish.”

  They were cleaning her tank. Auggie had been concerned about how quickly the chemicals were becoming discolored this time and how many small pieces of Gerta’s flesh were falling off. Clay, who had devised the method of resurrecting Gerta in the first place, would come by whenever Auggie had a problem or concern about the arrangement, as they discreetly called it.

  “It may be time to increase the vivazine content in the solution,” the taxidermist muttered as he oiled the gears at the base of Gerta’s home. “The decay process is trying to reassert itself. I’m sure I can fight it back, Auggie, don’t worry. I’ll take care of her.”

  “Thank you, Clayton. You are a good friend. I am sorry I snapped at you.”

  “Did you?” Clay grinned and pushed one of his few remaining greasy forelocks out of his eyes. “I ain’t that good at telling sometimes what people say and do, Auggie, you know that.” He picked up the jeweler’s loupe and the special screwdrivers he had devised and began to adjust the timing springs on the motors and that sent current to Gerta’s brain.