The Six Messiahs

by Mark Frost

  "Between his fingers nested a small packet of foil, the size of a silver coin. He didn't look at me; he didn't speak. He didn't turn when I stopped and looked back at him. He lowered his hand and went inside a door. I followed him; down an alley, a narrow flight of stairs. A cheap red paper lantern bouncing in the wind outside a door. Inside: wet brick walls, stale mattresses on the floor, bodies laid out, dozens of them, languid, moving like seaweed. The Chinese man unwrapped the foil and stuffed a dark plug inside into a long black wooden pipe. He asked me for money. I gave him some. He never looked at my face. Showed me to a mattress. Held the pipe for me and lit it with his malformed hands."

  "Opium."

  Jack nodded; he couldn't meet Doyle's eyes. "I quit the needle after I fell; that was part of my rebirth, part of the hell I faced in that cave as my body gave up the hunger. I'd quit and never gone back. Not even in Belem where it was all around and I had every opportunity. Not once."

  Doyle offered no response: After all the rest, why does he so badly want me to think he's telling the truth about this?

  "The pipe took away the pain in my hands. It filled the emptiness that had eaten away at me; a warmth, some feeling, anything—"

  "You don't need to explain."

  "—the pipe became my world; my world became that room. Three years. The most exquisite feeling when the hunger comes on and all you need is to strike a match. The ease of it. Never out of reach. If I'd found darkness before, now I dropped into the center of the earth. The man kept jade figurines by the beds; statues of gods, demons. You hold one in your hands after the pipe and stare at it, let the cool sheen of its surface come into you; patterns, crystalline swirls that solve the deepest mysteries. Peace you can't reach even in dreams. Time erased; only the now, that moment. I felt more love from that pipe than any human being ever gave me. The happiest moments of my life."

  "But it was false, a false happiness. It wasn't real," said Doyle, unable to contain the greatest agitation he'd felt since their conversation began.

  "Who's to say? It's only our perceptions anyway...."

  "Rubbish; it's drug-induced, not a natural state. Surely you haven't gone that far adrift from common sense."

  "Bless you, Doyle; consistent to the end. Let's have that feet-planted-firmly-in-the-garden-of-man's-innate-goodness nonsense from you now; I could always depend on you for that____"

  Doyle could no longer restrain himself. "Why would you speak to me that way? What harm did I ever do you? You've done it all to yourself."

  Sparks turned away: Was that the hint of a smirk or a grimace?

  "So you added opium addiction to your curriculum vitae; bravo Jack, I was afraid you might leave it out entirely. What's next on your agenda, rape? Pedophilia? Or did you cover both of those with that Brazilian girl? Heartless murder's already on the list; shame to let a little free will go to waste. Since that's your modus operandi now, why deny yourself anything? It's all defensible the way you've defined the game."

  "What is it that offends you: My crimes or their so-called immorality?"

  "As if they could be so easily divided. I'll tell you: It's the casual contempt with which you dismiss the efforts of what you call ordinary people to live a life that adheres to a semblance of decency; that you 'discovered' the way human beings live, as if you were observing a colony of ants. What gives you the right to pass such judgments? Where's the virtue that elevates you to such a godlike plane? You think your suffering entitles you to an exclusion from justice? Let me tell you: Everyone suffers and it relieves no one of his responsibility to obey the law. Do you honestly believe you're above the reach of consequences for what you've done?"

  "Far from it..."

  "I'll tell you to your face, you sound like a lunatic, Jack Sparks, and a menace to any person you might meet, myself included. The truth is you've fallen onto the same road that led your brother to that disastrous ruin of a human life. Or has that been your ambition all along?"

  Jack couldn't face him now. "No ..."

  "I dispute you. I've built a life for myself these last ten years. I did it with determination and hard work and, yes, through obedience to standards of social order. Without that "contract binding us, every man dedicated to his own pleasure according to an unfixed code of moral conduct, all you have left is unmitigated savagery and a civilization no better off, no more advanced, than the sort lived by jackals. I thought you were a good man once; no, a great man. I wanted nothing more in my life than to be like you. I am shocked. Shocked and I am bitterly disappointed. If you're the result of a life lived to the contrary, then I say thank God for society and thank God for the laws of man. You've left them behind; you're beyond the pale."

  Jack turned slowly back in his seat and looked at Doyle: his pale face stark white, the scar lining his jaw livid, radiating tension and despair. His mouth hung open; his eyes sank deep into their sockets.

  "I never claimed there were no consequences," he whispered harshly. "Consequences are all I've been describing."

  "Then let's be clear about it: Are you telling me all this to ask for my sympathy or approval?"

  "No..."

  "Because if what you want is absolution, I can tell you I haven't the authority or inclination to give it."

  "No, no. I thought... all I had hoped for ... something closer to"—Jack's chest heaved with sudden uncontainable emotion; his breath quivered violently, face contorted in pain-—"to understanding. You, of all people. I thought you might... understand."

  Jack inhaled sharply, then he sobbed. "I don't know... who I am. I don't know how ... I don't know how to live...."

  Doyle watched in shock as the man before him came disastrously undone. His crippled hands clenched spasmodically at the fabric of the seats, tears splashed from his scarlet eyes; he sat upright for a long moment, rigid as a post, then sagged over as if his spine had collapsed.

  "I'm so ... ashamed ... so deeply ashamed, the things I've done ... what I've turned into. Like him. You're right: Like him." Jack's self-hatred so much deeper than any other could have felt for him: Doyle stunned. "Should have died before I let that happen, should have found courage to kill myself but I couldn't... I couldn't. . ."

  Words tumbling out in a rush, fractured by his sobs. "Put a razor to my wrist.. . gun in my mouth ... too afraid to finish. Couldn't, so afraid to die, any emptiness greater than what... I'd been living. That fear ... all that kept me alive.; Worse than a coward. Worse than an animal... God ... God help me, please, God, help me...."

  Jack doubled over, sobbing until it seemed his heart would shatter with the strain. Wounded bellows crashed out of him, like the roll of immense waves, washing Doyle's anger away; pity rose up in him, and remembrance of the good in this man. He reached out to Jack, who seemed now so far beyond human reassurance.

  "Jack, no. No, Jack."

  As Doyle's hand sought out his and took hold, Jack stiffened, unable to accept any comfort, his shame even stronger than the pain. His sobs fell away like a retreating tide. He slid his hand from Doyle's grasp, stood up, turned to the wall, and covered his face with both hands. Shudders rippled his back as he struggled to control himself.

  "Forgive me," he whispered. "Please forgive me."

  "It's all right."

  Jack shook his head once, sharply, and fled from the room, never showing his face, never looking back. Doyle went immediately after him into the hall, but Sparks had already disappeared from sight.

  chapter 10

  Apparently the rabbi had taken ill somewhere between Phoenix and Wickenburg; a porter had come into the car about half an hour after the old man had gone off to stretch his legs and quietly asked Eileen to accompany him. She returned a few minutes later asking for a flask of liquor—Bendigo wasn't about to give his up—then exited the car again with one borrowed from a stagehand and her makeup case; God forbid a woman should ever leave that behind.

  When they left the train at the Wickenburg Station, Eileen insisted on tending personally to Rabbi Ste
rn, warning off other members of the company by telling them that whatever he'd come down with might carry dire threat of contagion; more than enough warning to keep a bunch of superstitious actors at a healthy distance. Bendigo watched Eileen and a tall, thin man in an ill-fitting formal black suit help Rabbi Stern down the steps of the cargo car, where he'd been resting since his "episode."

  Stern walked slowly, stiff-legged, doubled-over, leaning on their arms for support, still wearing his hat and half-covered with a blanket even in the brutal noonday heat; his long white beard poked over the blanket, but not much else of him was visible. Eileen and the tall volunteer passenger—he was a doctor who happened to be on board the train, according to Eileen, although if he was a doctor, where was his bag?—guided the rabbi inside the station where he rested in seclusion on a cot in the ticket office. Something about the doctor and the suit he was wearing felt familiar, but Bendigo's mind moved on to administrative concerns before anything could surface.

  Sets and costumes were loaded off the train and onto the prairie schooners Rymer had hired from a local livery for the last leg of their journey—some sixty miles of rough road; they were scheduled to spend a night on the way at a charming little way station by the name of Skull Canyon. Eileen handily won the argument with Bendigo for allowing Rabbi Stern to continue on with them: Yes, Jacob was fit enough to travel and no, if Bendigo refused to let him go, then she'd be staying behind in Wickenburg as well and if that meant she missed their performances in the New Village or the Happy Hamlet or whatever this place was called, then that was the price Rymer should be prepared to pay. Her understudy was a dim-witted ninny who. would never make it through an entire show without a nervous fit, and as near as they were to the end of the tour Rymer wouldn't dream of laying out the cash required to replace his leading lady.

  Actresses! Everything a melodrama! A bizarre infatuation striking as relentlessly as yellow fever or desert disaster, or whatever mysterious disease this rabbi suffered from. Never again, vowed Rymer, would he place himself at the mercy of the female disposition. Certainly not after he had returned and conquered Broadway.... Wait: a brainstorm!

  Why shouldn't he find some ravishing young boy to play Ophelia; yes! It's not as if Shakespeare hadn't done it in his day; all the great female roles were originally written for boys to play. That was it; a revival of the grand tradition! And why stop there? Why couldn't a man play Gertrude as well, and every other female part? Why not do away with these bothersome strumpets once and for all? Nothing but trouble anyway, and the critics would surely stand and applaud his reverence for the classics!

  Brilliant idea, Bendigo: You see? Even this cloud hides a silver lining.

  But Eileen went on to impose one more intolerable condition: a private wagon to transport Rabbi Stern. He had to be quarantined, she argued logically: No other symptoms had appeared among the Players yet, thank God, but did Bendigo want to take the chance of infecting his entire troupe? Fine,

  Rymer agreed to the wagon, thinking: I'll be rid of you soon enough, you meddlesome harlot.

  So, following at an agreeable distance, the hospital schooner brought up the rear of their five-wagon mule train as it rolled out of Wickenburg; the Rabbi and Eileen in back, doing her best Florence Nightingale. Once they were out of town, the tall, thin doctor—who happened to be headed for The New City as well; who was in fact driving their wagon—peeked through the ratted burlap curtain at the nurse and her patient.

  "Sorry about the bumps,""li^ said, "but I don't think you can attribute it to my driving, however incompetent it might be. A little asphalt they could use in Arizona."

  "You're doing fine, Jacob," said Eileen.

  "What about my suit? Did any of your colleagues recognize it?"

  "I took pieces from three different costumes we aren't even using in this production; if anyone noticed, they would have mentioned it by now."

  "I hope nobody else comes down with anything," said Jacob. "If I'm supposed to be a doctor, I'm afraid they'll find my knowledge of medicine to be slightly deficient."

  "If anyone asks, we'll tell them I misunderstood; you're actually a horse doctor."

  "Good; at least the horses can't contradict me. But please God don't let any of them get sick: I won't even known which end to look into."

  She moved back in the wagon, removed Jacob's round hat from the ailing man's head, and wiped his forehead with a damp cloth; he looked up at her with his dull strange eyes.

  "Thank you," said Kanazuchi.

  "That beard doesn't chafe too much, does it?" she asked. "Afraid I used a bit too much spirit glue to fix it on but we couldn't have it melting in the heat and have any hope of carrying the whole thing off, could we?"

  Kanazuchi shook his head. His hand found Grass Cutter lying under the long black coat at his side and he closed his eyes, letting the bumps and jolts of the wagon carry him toward meditation. He needed sleep now; the wound cleaned and freshly dressed, no sign of infection. The dry desert heat felt comforting. He trusted the wisdom of the body to take care of the rest.

  Eileen watched the Japanese until he drifted into sleep, still trying to digest everything he and Jacob had told her: stolen books, haunting dreams about a tower in the desert, disturbingly similar to the one that rumors said was being built in the town they were headed for. As he slept, she moved across the wagon, settling just behind Jacob on the driver's seat.

  He rattled the reins and called out to his charges, "You are the most excellent mules, you're driving very straight now in a very satisfactory way. I can't tell you how pleased I am with you."

  "How are you getting along?" she asked.

  "Splendidly! Driving is a very simple procedure; you pull the reins to the left, they go to the left; pull to the right, they go right," said Jacob; then he leaned back toward her. "You're the first person I've ever confessed it to, but I have always had a secret desire to be a cowboy."

  "Your secret's safe with me," she said.

  Jacob ran a hand over his smoothly shaven face, looking fifteen years younger shorn of the Old Testament whiskers Eileen had then diligently pasted onto Kanazuchi. "I haven't been without a beard since I was a boy. Sixteen years old; part of my religious requirements, you know. We're not supposed to touch a razor to our skin; they say it's too reminiscent of pagan bloodletting rituals."

  "Thank heaven you didn't cut yourself shaving."

  "Thank heaven I didn't try shaving while bumping around in these feckukteh wagons; I'd look like one of those revolving poles outside a barber shop."

  "You look very handsome, Jacob. You'll probably have women chasing you all over the desert."

  "Really?" he said, stopping to consider the idea. "What a strange experience that would be. Tell me, how is our patient?"

  "Resting comfortably."

  "Good. What a marvelous sensation: to feel the air on my skin again. I feel as naked as a newborn baby. To be honest, if I were to look in a mirror I would hardly know whose face this is."

  Yours, she thought. Only yours, you dear sweet man.

  The mules slackened their pace, looking for guidance from the reins.

  "Oy there, giddyup, I think that's tjie appropriate expression, isn't it? Giddyup, meine schene kleine chamers. Oy there!"

  The special express train carrying Buckskin Frank and his volunteer avengers did not reach Wickenburg until just after sunset. Procedural details of commandeering a train after Frank found blood on the tracks had delayed them in Phoenix for four precious hours. Drawn by the announcement of a five-thousand-dollar reward, the posse had snowballed to include nearly forty men by now, picking up self-righteous crusaders like dog hair on a dust mop as they rolled through Arizona, and a plague of journalists had attached themselves as well. The result: A simple task like questioning the Wickenburg Station personnel turned into a Tower of Babel; every volunteer and reporter taking it upon himself to conduct his own investigation until Frank had to fire his Henry semiautomatic carbine into the air to shut them up.<
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  As it turned out, no one at the station had seen a Chinaman get off the noon mail run with the Penultimate Players, but the train was still standing in the yard and, even though somebody had tried to clean up the traces, Frank found a fair amount of blood had spilled out onto the floor of the cargo car. Enough evidence to move on; and more than enough to fire up this pack of amateur headhunters into wanting to make a night ride to Skull Canyon, where the troupe of actors was scheduled to bunk in.

  Following Frank's advice, the posse did not wire ahead to the Skull Canyon telegraph office for fear of tipping anyone off: Easy enough to convince his fellow pursuers that was the prudent move; if Chop-Chop—a Phoenix newspaper had hung that headline-grabbing nickname on the marauding Chinaman and it was catching on fast—was this close at hand, the posse naturally wanted the glory of his capture to rain down only on themselves. After posing for a flurry of self-aggrandizing photographs, weighed down with so many weapons and bandoliers they might be mistaken for Pancho Villa's army, the posse repaired to Wickenburg's only saloon for some serious drinking.

  Figured these actors would be the ones to harbor a murdering fugitive, the talk in McKinney's Cantina soon developed. Two peas in a pod. Can't trust theatrical people—that much was common knowledge, if not sense—ever since John Wilkes Booth shot the President, an event nearly every one of these armchair lawmen was old enough to remember. Actors were liars by profession, 'specially the traveling kind: whorin', thievin' rascals. Lock up your daughters and hide the silverware. Ought to be a law, and so on.

  In plenty of places out west there were such laws, Sheriff Tommy Butterfield pointed out in his bland, pedantic, meandering way; upon their arrival, actors are required to notify local law enforcement of their comings and goings. Not in Arizona, mind you, but plenty of other places.