by Norman Crane
I live in Canada. I write books. I’m also a historian, a wise guy and a cinephile. When I’m not writing, I’m probably reading or trying to cook. Philip Dick, Haruki Murakami and Graham Greene are some of my favourite authors. I enjoy fiction that makes me curious because curiosity makes me creative. I peer under mossy rocks, knock on hollow trees and believe in hidden passageways—not because I have proof of their existence, but because imagining them is itself the reward. I like non-fiction for the same reason. I also like computers, text editors and mechanical keyboards.
For more info and links to my writing, please visit my website: normancrane.ca
The first bullet drilled a hole clean through the bandito’s sombrero, through which the rays of the hot noonday sun fell like whips on the glistening muzzle of Fenimore’s rifle, peeking out from between two dusty rocks a good hundred paces away. The bandito didn’t move. He’d already drawn his revolver. He merely cocked his head, and the sun’s rays slid from the muzzle to a thick bead of sweat gathering on Fenimore’s brow. Fenimore didn’t say a word. He just chomped down on his cigar, moved the muzzle slightly to the left, squinted—and made sure the second bullet didn’t miss.
It hit straight into the bandito’s forehead like an Ash Wednesday cross.
The rays disappeared.
The bandito crumpled to the ground.
Fenimore slung his rifle over his shoulder, took one last drag of his cigar and tossed it aside. It hit the ground no less dead than the bandito.
Fenimore rose from his crouch, watched—no dust rose on the horizon—and listened. There was no beating of hooves. Nobody else was coming. They’d underestimated him. He grinned and looked forward to wearing clothes again. Save for the timepiece on his wrist he was naked, and the relentless sun had burned his skin brown.
He lowered himself down the side of the outcropping from which he’d shot, and circled to where he’d hidden his tired, thirsty burro. There’d be water in the bandito’s pack, he thought, untying the burro and patting its warm chest. He still hadn’t decided what he’d do with the bandito’s horse. Take it with him and sell it, probably.
The bandito’s corpse lay on its back, its eyes half open and still fully plastered over by the sheen of surprise. Bright blood trickled from the hole in its head.
Fenimore recognised the dirty face underneath: Pedro—a hired gun who rode with Ulrich’s gang, but not one of the dangerous ones. Pedro, as far as Fenimore remembered, had been a brave bad shot. Good qualities for a foot soldier, but bad ones for staying alive. Not that it mattered anymore. What mattered was that Ulrich had underestimated him. As for Pedro, he wouldn’t ever shoot a gun again. It was good to be underestimated. It was bad to be dead.
Fenimore pulled off Pedro’s boots, followed by his wide leather gun belt, cotton pants, worn shirt and navy-white poncho.
The dirty body underneath was flabby and hairy, and for a few seconds the sight of it made Fenimore wonder whether any woman loved it, whether the small time Mexican gunslinger had had a small Mexican wife who’d given birth to thin, barefoot Mexican children. But then the stink of death hit so hard that Fenimore ripped his eyes away. Each man chooses his own path. In doing so, each also chooses the way—if not the exact circumstance—of his death.
The bright blood flowing from the hole in Pedro’s head had turned still and dark.
Fenimore put on the dead man’s boots and clothes, tied the dead man’s horse to his own burro, and took a long drink from the dead man’s canteen. When his lips were wet and throat no longer dry, he let the burro drink the water, too. Its ears shot up at the first refreshing taste. The horse turned its emaciated snout to beg for a sip, but Fenimore didn’t let the horse drink. If it died, so be it. He wouldn’t get much for it anyway. He then tied Pedro’s gun belt around himself, inserted Pedro’s revolver into the holster and mounted his burro.
He looked ridiculous on the little animal, but he felt good.
The burro began its lumbering walk.
Pedro’s horse followed.
Eight hooves made eight dull sounds on the tough ground and as he rode Fenimore felt a few coins rattling around in his new pants pocket. They made a rhythmic jingle-jangle that somehow matched the monotony of the landscape around him. Jingle-jangle. The sun moved. Jingle-jangle. The shadows lengthened. Jingle-jangle and jingle-jangle and nothing except the passing emptiness…
When he finally stopped for the night, Fenimore took the coins out of his pocket and held them, one-by-one, between his thumb and forefinger against the darkening sky. He observed each in turn. The coins were seven. Six were old and grimy, probably whore money or poker winnings, but the seventh was clean and beautiful: freshly minted, and even more freshly stolen.
Seven coins for seven faces.
Six grimy ones for the six men who’d taken from him—Constanza, The Slovak, Butcher Bellicose, Tartaro, The Little Pimp, and Ulrich—and the seventh for the woman he’d loved, who’d sold him for a future full of dollars, and who now went unnamed, even in his head.
When he was done brooding, Fenimore stacked all seven coins in the palm of his hand and squeezed them into a fist as hard as he could. He would crush them. One-by-one, he would hunt them down and kill them.
He wanted to toss the coins into the air and massacre them with Pedro’s revolver.
But he was getting ahead of himself.
He was letting his emotions take control of his mind.
He focussed his thoughts, relaxed his fist, uncurled his long fingers and dropped the coins back into his pocket. There would be a time and place for revenge. Paths would cross, even on a continent as great and untamed as this one, but that would be many days and many adventures from now. Tonight, he needed rest. Tomorrow, he would formulate a plan. In the coolness of the present evening, although he finally felt safe enough to close his eyes, he was also broke and hungry.
As he lay himself down to sleep, Fenimore felt weaker and more alone than he’d ever felt. Even during the survival days he’d not felt this way. He’d had company. Tonight was also the fourth consecutive night that he was spending alone, and he wasn’t used to it. A man gets used to the female shape. Sleeping without a woman’s body—without his woman’s body—next to him was as strange as riding without a horse. He had nowhere to put his arms and no one with whom to share his warmth. He was swimming without water. He was a fire without heat. He was the empty landscape and the day’s heavy, closing eyelids. They had taken everything from him, but it was she who had taken his soul, leaving him as bare and exposed as he’d left Pedro, with just the one-hole sombrero on his head and all of America chomping at the bit to swallow him up.
He imagined a pair of vultures pecking away at Pedro’s body, pulling at long, elastic bits of flesh.
He remembered Master Taki once telling him, “Everything breaks. Give something enough time, and it cracks.” Then Master Taki had—click—opened the safe. “Everything breaks.”
Even trust.
Even love.
A shot rang out.
A bullet bit the rocky ground a few paces from his body and ricocheted away.
Fenimore scrambled behind Pedro’s gaunt horse.
The horse took the next bullet to its chest, its knees buckled, and down it went. Fenimore went down with it: unslinging his rifle and using the struggling horse’s overturned body for cover. Better the horse than the burro, he thought. Thinking kept him calm. He scanned the dark horizon with the muzzle of his rifle for shapes, for movement.
There was nothing.
There was another shot.
This one whizzed by just above Fenimore’s head.
Instinct made him duck.
The horse was still breathing: wheezing.
At least he knew the direction the shots were coming from. It wasn’t the direction from which he’d come. Unless someone was intentionally playing at disorientation, the shooter wasn’t someone who’d been in pursuit.
Fenimore unloaded a blind rifle shot into the darkness to keep the shooter on his toes.
It was returned immediately along with the words, “You goddamn bastard cocksucker!”
The burro started braying.
The words continued, punctuated by bullets. “I seen you in your blue poncho. I seen you through the sky glass, cocksucker. Goddammit. Goddamn, thief fuck.”
Blue poncho? Fenimore peaked out, saw a lone figure on horseback in the distance—closing in on him—and hugged the ground again. He gripped his rifle.
“The man you’re looking for is dead,” he said toward the murky sky. “I took his clothes.”
He was thinking: estimating the horse’s speed, trying to calculate the best moment to stand up, aim and shoot the rider down.
“I bet you killed him, you lying fuck.”
“I’ll kill you, too.”
To keep the rider talking, that was the most important thing. To judge the distance by his approaching voice.
“And if you did kill him, which I ain’t saying I believe in, what so? Does killin’ my enemy make you my friend?”
A gunshot clipped the sentence.
The voice didn’t seem any louder than the last time.
Fenimore peeked over the horse again.
The rider had stopped closing, but he was still too far and the evening was too deep.
“It makes nothing. Keep the peace and move on,” Fenimore said. If the rider had stopped, perhaps he could be persuaded to turn around.
“Well goddamn, but I don’t believe it.”
“Then believe there are more rifles on you.” It was worth a try. “Come closer and you’ll be face-down dead.”
The rider laughed. He had a hee-hawing, old man’s laugh. “I do believe you are alone, cocksucker thief fuck. My sky glass told me so, and I do believe what my sky glass tells me.”
The horse expired.
“The way I see it, the only cover you got is that ugly horse of yours, and I got enough bullets on my person and the person of my pretty horse to keep your noggin’ right down till ten mornings from now, which, goddamit, means I got enough bullets to rip through that wall of meat you think you can hide behind, bone by brittle bone. Else I’ll just watch the sun dry you up.”
“Everything breaks,” Master Taki had said.
Even me.
Fenimore considered leaping to his feet, locking his knees, taking the best possible early shot, and suffering the consequences—probably more than once, and probably to the head and to the chest and to the gut.
It was a brave idea, going out in a hail of bullets, but a dumb one. Pedro had been dumbly brave. Fenimore wasn’t Pedro. That was precisely the problem.
“Ask me a question,” he yelled.
“You don’t interest me in any way except dead.”
“Have you ever killed an innocent man?”
“Ain’t worried about that.”
Fenimore wiggled out of Pedro’s navy-white poncho and draped it over the end of his rifle, which he lifted above the horse, waving it like a flag.
Three shots rang out. Straight through the poncho they flew, and far, far away.
Then nothing.
Then, “Where’d you get that?” the rider asked.
“I don’t interest you.”
“That’s right, cocksucker, but I am interested in whoever you stole that gadget from. And dead men don’t talk, even nonsense. Speak the fuck up, now.”
Fenimore realized the rider was talking about his timepiece. He lowered his arm, the rifle and the shot up poncho. The timepiece had been his father’s. A prototype, there wasn’t another like it in the world, and none at all on this side of the ocean. In Europe, they had them for women, or so Fenimore had been told once, a long and hazy time ago.
“Toss it over, along with yer rifle and that revolver you got on yer belt, and maybe I’ll let you live a few hours.”
The rider truly had been watching him. It wasn’t a bluff. But at least this was a chance. If the rider wanted just the timepiece he could as easily get it off Fenimore’s dead wrist as his live one. And if getting rid of the timepiece—he pressed stinging sweat out of his eyes—meant saving his life, that was a gift that his father would have gladly given, had already given him once.
He slid the timepiece off his wrist and let it fall into his hand. Its face was silver, circular and covered by a thin layer of glass. The glass was dirty, and the sky reflected in it was distorted. When Fenimore adjusted the angle, his reflection, too, became a distortion.
“Don’t try nuthin’ funny.”
Fenimore tore a square of material from the shirt he was wearing, wrapped it around the timepiece and tied a tight knot. He unloaded Pedro’s revolver and his rifle, and lobbed both over the dead horse, in the direction of the rider. Finally, he palmed the makeshift cloth sack and lobbed it over, too. What he would have given for just one grenade…
When he heard the rider’s horse come within stomping distance, Fenimore stood. There was no more point in hiding. Either the rider had been bluffing or not, and if there was a point to a bluff Fenimore couldn’t figure it out. There was certainly a value to the timepiece. Thievery was reasonable.
Fenimore’s burro had stopped braying.
The rider, who was indeed an old man, had dismounted his horse, which wasn’t actually very pretty at all, and was unwrapping the cloth sack with the nimble fingers and excited expression of a boy touching his first pair of breasts. When he saw the timepiece, his eyes lit up and spittle nearly dropped from between his lips.
He looked up at Fenimore.
And hooted!
“Well damn myself to fuck sideways cunt face, you ain’t the thief bastard, truly. Hoo hoo hoo!” But when Fenimore lifted a boot off the ground to take another step forward, the rider raised his bony arm just as fast to point the barrel of a strange looking gun in Fenimore’s face. “You sure got the burnt skin, though. How long you been out in the elements? You one of them crazies from Gulliver’s Participle?”
The rider’s eyes darted back and forth from the timepiece to Fenimore to the timepiece to Fenimore to—
Fenimore ducked, leapt and grabbed the rider’s gun.
It went off.
With a deafening blast.
And a cloud of choking black smoke.
But when the cloud cleared and both men regained their breathing, it was Fenimore who was holding the right end of the gun and the rider who was staring into its barrel.
“Hoo hoo hoo! Well I be goddamned. Not one of them crazies, neither. I got to admit my mistake. I do believe I am interested in you.” Without waiting for a response, he disregarded the gun pointing at his gut and went back to inspecting the timepiece, which he still held, carefully, in his left hand. “What do you say we trade your story for my soup?”
Fenimore didn’t answer. He stepped to the side to collect the rifle and the revolver he’d thrown over. “The man whose poncho I was wearing, why’d you want to kill him?”
“Wasn’t innocent,” the rider mumbled while wiping the timepiece with the outside of his shirt sleeve. When he was done, he looked up. “This”—He held up the timepiece like women sometimes hold up their favourite babies.—“is remarkable workmanship. What so of the soup, do you say? Fuck.”
Fenimore’s trigger finger twitched.
“Apologies,” the rider said. “Goddamit!” He stomped his feet. “It’s only a tiny problem with the communication, cocksucker, that’s all, ain’t nothing to give you the fears.” He was apparently referring to his predisposition to cursing.
He wrapped the timepiece and slid it into his pocket, then extended his other hand to Fenimore.
They were two strangers standing in the middle of a vast nowhere, surrounded by darkness, who between them had at least three guns, one experimental timepiece, a burro, and two ugly horses, one of which was dead. The one positive aspect of the situation—at least for Fenimore—was that the rider wasn’t one of Ulrich’s.
“What’s your name?” the rider asked.
“Fenimore.”
When Fenimore didn’t offer his hand, the rider smiled and let his own drop with understanding to his side. “They call me The Starman.”
Fenimore pointed with the gun to The Starman’s horse, which had found a rare desert plant and was chewing on it. “Tie him to my burro and get on. And hand me my timepiece.”
The Starman shrugged his shoulders. Without losing his smile, he did as he’d been told.
Fenimore slung his rifle over his shoulder and slid Pedro’s revolver back into the holster. He’d started the day naked, holding a single rifle and being pursued by a hired killer. As night fell and the stars spread themselves across the inky sky above, he held a strange gun, still had the rifle, had added a revolver, a full set of functional, albeit smelly, clothes and was now in possession of a sort-of prisoner of his own.
“You know, Fenimore,” The Starman said after he’d connected the horse to the burro with a series of unusual knots, “if you pull that trigger, cocksucker, gun won’t fire worth salt. You better switch up yer weapons.”
Fenimore jerked the gun well clear of The Starman and fired: a thin, quiet wisp of smoke.
“That, too. Hoo hoo hoo.” He reached over and pushed a mechanical piece on the side of the gun barrel. “Now you got the fuck back to long distance firin’ mode.”
Fenimore squinted an eye, aimed at the moon—
And the recoil smashed so hard into his unsuspecting shoulder that he nearly yelped. The bullet shot out fast and true, and maybe all the way to the lunar surface.
“Hoo hoo hoo! Try again now. Point her at me.”
The Starman grabbed the gun and put it flush against his chest. Through the gun, Fenimore felt how wiry the old man was. He didn’t want to pull the trigger.
“I pointed her at you. Now you point her at me. Send me to the heavens and hells, bells, fucker.”
The trigger gave just as easy, but the gun didn’t fire, not even a pathetic wisp.
The Starman smiled, mumbled something about soup, and leapt onto the back of his horse. “Ain’t she a beaut,” he said after he’d gotten settled, pulling in a loud lungful of air. “That cocksucker of a starry sky, I mean. Did you know some of them stars is dead. Still shinin’ brighter than you or me, but deader than the thief fuck you say you killed, which I do believe to be the case indeed.” He seemed to have captured the stars’ sparkle in his eyes, which were at once crazed and brilliant. “But tell me, Fenimore, you bitch’s son, are you really gonna ride that ass?”
The Starman and the burro both looked at Fenimore.
He answered by getting on the latter and prodding The Starman’s horse to start moving. “Lead the way, Starman.”
“I get it, I get it. I stay in front so that you can murder me in the back with yer rifle if I try somethin’.” He pulled out the timepiece, which Fenimore had forgotten was still in the Starman’s pocket, and started rubbing it again.
And as they strolled along—The Starman on his high horse, cursing softly under his breath to nobody in particular, and Fenimore behind, riding on a burro so squat that his legs were almost dragging along the ground—Fenimore closed his eyes and finally fell hard and fast asleep.
What woke him was the smell of coffee.
He was in a small room on a bed. In the room, beside the bed, was a window. Outside the window the world was dark. Fenimore’s rifle was in his arms but the belt and holster hung on a roughly made wooden chair next to the bed. Use had rubbed the varnish off the chair’s seat. Through his sunburned nose, Fenimore smelled the aroma of food: not good food, but edible. With the smell of food came heat, and then a door opened into a rectangle of light, a figure stood in the door, and The Starman walked in holding a dinged up metal cup. He took a seat in the chair, sliding down until he was almost lying in it, and handed the cup to Fenimore.
“Don’t you be worried,” he said. “I made sure you kept yer rifle on me at all times so I wouldn’t get away.”
The coffee tasted bitter but good.
“How long,” Fenimore gasped between hot gulps, “was I asleep?”
The Starman shrugged. “Three hours, I reckon.”
“And my burro?”
“The ass snores outside. Shouldn’t ever wake up, the beast was so tired.”
Fenimore finished the rest of the coffee, swallowing the grinds as greedily as he had the liquid, and handed the cup back to The Starman.
“Soup’s on the fire.”
“Why do they call you The Starman?”
“Who calls me that?”
“You said—”
“I know what I says, but there ain’t hardly a point in asking why if you don’t know who.”
“All right. Who calls you The Starman?”
The Starman looked into the cup. “I see yer so hungry I can’t even read your fortune from the blacks.”
“You’re a fortune teller.” Fenimore’s lips curled into a snarl. If his voice was a thing, it would have been sandpaper.
“Hoo hoo hoo! An astereologist, me? It’s not far down the road from truth, but never! I don’t give them horroscopic arts the time of night they deserve. And I mean when I get ‘em. I wouldn’t ever give ‘em. Bunch of cocksucker hogwash fuck if you ask me.”
The fire crackled from the other room.
“But you were asking,” The Starman said, more serious, “about who calls me by my name. The answer is the folks over in Hope Springs.”
Fenimore realised the man wanted to talk. Based on his rough manners and growing list of eccentricities, he wasn’t exactly a social butterfly. Based on the taste of his coffee, he didn’t have a woman in the house.
A woman.
The thought stabbed Fenimore in the temples until he sucked in air through his clenched teeth. The pain reminded him of the one whose name he refused to remember. The seventh, cleanest, coin weighed heavily in his pocket. “Why do ‘the folks over in Hope Springs’ call you The Starman?”
“It’s because of my sky glass. I’m an astereonomer, which is what the Latins called themselves when they looked through their tubes at the stars. Of course”—The Starman bit his lower lip. Fenimore couldn’t decide whether he was seeing genuine insanity or merely a very convincing act.—“my sky glass has other uses too. Like seeing men in blue ponchos ride their burros onto my property of land, goddamit.”
Fenimore had forgotten about Pedro, about killing him. He shuddered. He was still wearing the smell of the dead man on his clothes.
“The man in the blue poncho, what did he do to you?”
The Starman’s fingers tightened around the ear of the metal cup until both the fingers and the cup started to shake. “Oh, I seen him riding with the Rhodes boys. Don’t like me them Rhodes boys, cocksuckers. Especially that old Iron Rhodes…”
For a second, The Starman was violence itself.
Then he smiled real wide and tall, revealing both rows of missing teeth, and Fenimore knew why The Starman liked soup so much.
“And that gun of yours?”
The Starman rose from the chair. “Tit for tat, tit for tat, goddamn. I told you about my name, now I want to hear about that timepiece of yers.” He pointed with his crooked nose through the doorway. “We’ll eat my legume soup and you’ll tell me a story about it, and then I’ll tell you the story of my gun.”
Fenimore must not have looked convinced because The Starman added, “And an end to all these killin’ looks. I had my chance to make you dead, and I didn’t do it. You had yer chance, too, and you didn’t do it neither. So now the killin’ chances are passed and we is friends and guests and I will be treating you to feastin’ real well. Hoo hoo hoo!”
A gun went off.
Fenimore slid off the bed, landed with a thud on the floor, and was massaging the trigger of his rifle.
“Take as them my apologies,” the Starman said. He hadn’t even budged. “But I guess I got to remember to be more careful when I do my hootin’!”
Again Fenimore was treated to the sight of The Starman’s wet gums.
They lead him off the floor and into the living room, which was significantly larger than the bedroom, had all of its windows boarded up, a large fireplace in the corner, and two long handmade tables, the surfaces of which were covered with springs, gears, cogs and other mechanical doodads. In the corner opposite the fireplace stood about two dozen tall rolls of paper.
“Maps, land and sky,” The Starman said while swiping clean an area on one of the tables. Next he retrieved a sooty pot from the fire and placed it, steaming, on the place he’d cleared. He also retrieved two stone bowls from a cupboard, motioned for Fenimore to sit on a rickety bench, and poured both bowls full of thick, green sludge. There was ample soup for seconds but Fenimore’s hunger, rabid as it was, allowed him to wait for a spoon.
It never came.
“Dig in, guest, cocksucker!” The Starman roared, taking a seat on the bench on the other side of the table, and dipped his fingers into the sludge. He lifted it greedily to his mouth, closed his eyes, licked, lapped and swallowed. The swallowing made his Adam’s Apple extrude to an unnaturally hideous degree.
Fenimore dipped two fingers into his own bowl of sludge, lifted them slowly, and tasted.
The sludge was vile.
But it was food, and so he ate it.
“The timepiece,” The Starman mumbled between handfuls of soup. “Tell me its story.”
“Where is it?” Fenimore asked. The soup was starting to burn both his tongue and the underside of his mouth. “And what’s in this soup?”
The Starman stopped eating and answered with pride while licking drops off his upper lip. “Legumes, mostly. Chicken cocksucker legumes and frog goddamit legumes. Sometimes I get me a pig if I barter, so I mixtures them in too. And bones of general kind. Don’t usually use any beaks though. Don’t like the taste. And of course then I pestle it up and disinfecate it with water and moonshine so that it’s healthy in the medical way.”
Fenimore almost choked.
“As for yer timepiece,” The Starman was saying, “it’s on that table there right behind you.”
Fenimore looked. The timepiece was on the table; but, more properly, all the parts of the timepiece were on the table without themselves comprising a timepiece.
“Now don’t get yer blood veins all burst, I didn’t break it. I took it apart.”
Everything breaks.
“And everything that I take apart I can put back the way it was. I’m just good that way. Born nature, as folks say. Always have been and, goddamn, always will be. Excuse me.” He passed several toots of gas. “It’s all in the old noggin’ up here.” Tap-tap-tap he went against his head. “This timepieces of yers though, ain’t never seen a thing like it. Precise cocksucker, real good, real interesting. Lots of tiny little springs, real delicate. If you ask me, anything worth beans be made from lots of springs.”
“My father built it,” Fenimore said.
“He dead?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess them’s the words to the end of the story.”
“The end of the story.”
All the soup was gone from The Starman’s bowl. Fenimore still had half of his left. “Listen to this here offer I’m giving,” the Starman said. “I know a man won’t sell no heirloom built by his father, now dead, God rest his, cocksucker, soul—pardon me—but if I would pay with bread, board and company just for some time to investigate the heirloom, without ownership passing…”
Fenimore angled his brows. He felt the need for a cigar he could chomp down on. “You’re going to let me stay here and eat your food if I let you fiddle with my timepiece?”
“Yes.”
“And what am I going to do here?”
“Rest?” The Starman suggested with a salesman’s smile.
“Tell me about that gun.”
“A trade?”
“Tell me its story.”
The Starman wiped his mouth and rubbed his hands together, before setting the palms flat on the table. He had bulbous knuckles.
“Well, see, that gun she’s a little spring filled contraception of my own making, if I do say so myself. And I do say so.” He almost hooted. “Goddamn, if she ain’t a funny one too. Most of my contraceptions don’t quite function the way I design them, but this here gun, you see, once upon a time, when I still had me a wife before that bastard Iron Rhodes notarised them yellow belly papers—”
“Give me the short story.”
“Apologies. It’s just I ain’t had a soul to talk with for a long time.”
“Real short.”
“Real short says she’s yer rifle, yer shotgun, and yer dynamite all in one pretty little metal package, controlled by springs of course. Flip her switch to change her from long distance to short distance to real short, real cocksucker-go-boom distance. If you wanna lock her up, for safekeepin’ say, you hoot: three times.” He hoo hoo hoo’d very quietly. “Another three such same hoots wakes her up. Or, if she be in cocksucker-go-boom range, you hoot and she gets gone along with whatever mishappens to be within her boom range.”
“What range is that?”
“I guess a circumcision of a fair sized twenty five foot, or a radius of half of that in metres, dependin’ on your brand of mathematics. Metres is what they use in France.”
A man could go far with a gun like that, Fenimore mused. “And this town you mentioned, Hope Spring.”
“Springs.”
“Yeah.”
“Yep.”
“Is it far from here?”
“Thirty minutes ridin’, maybe more if you go by ass.”
Now Fenimore’s bowl was empty, too. Despite himself he reached for another helping. The moonshine in the soup was getting to him, mixing with the tiredness that still hadn’t gone. Sometimes a man is nothing but a slave to his own rumbling stomach. “Could a man find work in this town?”
The Starman stared at him.
“Work—for money,” Fenimore repeated.
The Starman made fists of his hands, which were still resting on the tabletop. “Only thing a man will find in Hope Springs these days is a feud. She used to be a fine little town in the Rodriguez days, but she ain’t one no more. I suggest if it’s honest work a man is after, he turn his self east and ride on to Gulliver’s Participle.”
Nobody had asked about honest work, and Fenimore knew from experience that feuds could be lucrative. They provided business opportunities of a particular kind for men of a particular disposition who possessed the right, very particular, set of skills.
“How far is Gulliver’s Participle?”
“Five days ridin’.”
“And what kind of work is a man likely to find there?”
“Ditch diggin’,” said The Starman. “In Gulliver’s Participle they like their ditches. Goddamn, they like ‘em cocksucker long and gravely deep.” The soup was starting to get to him, too. “You ever dug a long, gravely ditch?”
“If I ride out to Gulliver’s Participle to dig ditches I’ll take my timepiece with me.”
“I reckon.”
Fenimore glanced at the fire and the The Starman got up and poured them each a second cup of coffee.
After he sat back down, he took a sip and said, “I find yer timepiece interesting and there’s value to me in takin’ it apart and fiddlin’ with its springs, yet still I recommend a man take his horse—or ass, as the beast may be—and go ridin’ on his way to Gulliver’s Participle to earn his money diggin’ ditches. A man might consider that what you call advice.”
“I like to see a place before I pass judgment.”
“Sounds mightily fair coming out the face of a man who, goddamn, killed another and took his horse, his gun and his clothes.”
“I like to see a man before passing judgment on him, too. But then I pass it.”
“Why’d you pass judgment on the man in the blue poncho?”
“I liked what he was wearing.”
Fenimore had no intention of talking about the past and The Starman understood and didn’t press. It was the quiet understanding of a man whose own past was too painful to talk about, even with a brain drenched by moonshine soup. They finished their coffee in silence.
“How long until the sun comes up?” Fenimore asked.
“Four hours will see you the morning light.”
Fenimore stood up from the table, nodded in recognition of the meal and the company, and took steps toward the bedroom. Balance was trickier to keep than he’d remembered. His legs wobbled.
“Wake me up in four hours,” he said.
“And then?”
“And then I take your gun, your horse and I ride to pass judgment on Hope Springs.”
The Starman shook his head. “It ain’t a good idea, I tell ya. It’s a damn bad idea. Bastard bad, goddamit…”
“And you keep fiddling with my timepiece until I come back.”
“…ain’t such a bad idea. Not at all. I heard worse. “And,” he said, making big saucer eyes, “if you don’t come back none at all?”
“You keep the timepiece.”
“Full ownership property passes and them trader’s marks too?”
“That’s right.”
The Starman wasn’t satisfied. “One more condition.”
Fenimore growled.
“If you do come back, and I ain’t sayin’ I believe in it, but if such does come to pass, I also want the story of the timepiece.”
“It’s already been told.”
“You told the end of the story, not the beginning nor the central parts, and an ending ain’t a whole story, otherwise we’d all just be telling each other endings.” He squinted into the fire. “You ever hear of a child lay eyes on an ending book?”
“Who are you, Starman?”
The only answer was the crackle of the fire.
The Starman was a man of his word. At dawn, as the morning light peeked above the horizon and into the bedroom window, he shook Fenimore awake.
Fenimore grumbled before opening his eyes, then forced his aching body to sit.
His head was numb but the thoughts inside it were clear. The night had been filled with nightmares and the clanging of hammers. The Starman handed him a cigar. “For yer ride,” he said. “I also filled yer canteen and cleaned and loaded yer guns. The rifle I kept, ‘cause a man’s got a right to defend himself and his own, but the revolver and my hootin’ gun is yers. The horse is ready outside. She’s groggy from yesterday’s legumes but it’s a short ride and she’ll make it.”
Fenimore put the cigar between his lips, got to his feet and stretched out his arms. The first thing he’d do in town was get a room and take a long, hot bath. Afterward, he’d wash his clothes and come up with a plan.
The Starman handed Fenimore his poncho. “I patched up the holes I blasted.”
The holes had indeed been patched. The entire inner surface of the poncho had also been covered by a layer of chainmail. The resulting poncho-armour was heavy, but not unbearably so.
“I want more than an ending,” The Starman said in response to Fenimore’s look of surprise.
The word “thanks” didn’t quite make it out of Fenimore’s throat, but he thought it, bless his soul, and at least to himself that was some kind of moral progress.
“It ain’t none of my business, of course, what a strangerman does in a feudin’ town, but if that man was me I’d bed down in the Olympus Hotel in the morning and stay in my room like a bastard till the noon redeemin’ was over, after which I might make my discreetin’ way to the tavern and listen to the drunks before ending my night with a fuck at the Rodriguez Widow’s place. But be careful what you say, ‘cause them whores there got razors and no compunctions about cuttin’ yer face with ‘em.”
“Don’t break the timepiece.”
With that, Fenimore slid the poncho over his head and put on his belt. He took out the revolver and checked the cylinder. Six bullets, and it did look clean. It spun even cleaner. He replaced the revolver into the holster and stepped into the living room. The Starman followed him.
In the living room, the shutters in all the windows had been opened and everything was awash with pale light. The fire was dead.
The Starman rushed ahead and pushed open the door.
Fenimore shaded his eyes.
Outside, The Starman’s horse stood already saddled and with the hootin’ gun hanging from a special leather holster tied around its shoulders. Although the horse didn’t look any prettier today—its eyes were hung over and its colour was still a dull, cloudy grey—at least it was mobile. Every once in a while, it lurched forward and burped.
Fenimore hopped into the saddle.
He considered it a success that the horse didn’t fall over.
The Starman stuck a tin filled with brewed coffee in front of the horse’s snout and petted the animal’s neck with genuine affection. “She sure likes her coffee in the mornin’,” he said.
As the horse drank, Fenimore took in his surroundings. The emptiness looked different in the morning than it had at night. Less foreboding, vaster. A soft fog also hung in the air and the horizon, instead of being the sharp gash from which the bad men threatened to come into the world to make pain on you and your loved ones, looked as fuzzy as the Gates of Heaven through which God Himself would emerge on Judgment Day to bless some and strike down others for the pain they’d inflicted upon their own kin and kind.
Fenimore’s hand drifted naturally to rest on the grip of his holstered revolver.
“Return, goddamnit,” was all The Starman said, before slapping the horse on the hindquarters, sending both it and Fenimore barreling towards the east, toward Hope Springs, and straight into the pale flaming orb of the rising sun…
The barreling didn’t last. Within minutes it became a jog, and then a definite stroll as the horse lost its breath and regained its appreciation of yesterday’s moonshine. It wobbled. It swayed. Somewhere between The Starman’s cabin and Hope Springs, it stopped and threw up, then refused to budge its hooves until Fenimore dismounted and walked alongside it. This seemed to make it happy, and definitely made Fenimore regret not taking his burro instead. Burros didn’t believe in equality.
The fog thickened.
Soon, they came upon a wooden sign:
“Welcome to Hope Springs,” it said in badly painted gold letters on a faded purple background. Below, “where even strangers is eternal,” had been carved into the wood and more recently painted over with white.
Beyond the sign, the silhouettes of the town’s outermost buildings faded greyly in and out of view like a drowned rat bobbing up and down in a pail of milk.
Fenimore pulled the horse by the reins and they continued onward until the buildings sharpened into focus, followed by the blurred parts of others: acutely-angled corners, worn edges and desolate porches. They weren’t particularly exciting buildings, but they weren’t rundown, either. They were ordinary. A farmhouse, a wagon repair shop, a distillery, a grave-maker’s workshop. Fenimore had expected worse. There was still money to be had here.
As the ground became a hard packed dirt street, the horse’s hooves beat louder and echoed. There was hardly another sound to drown them out. The fog was silent, the street empty, and only an occasional, dull, knock from within the grave-maker’s workshop interrupted the slurred clickety-clack of a man strolling alongside his ugly, drunken horse.
But Fenimore’s eyes were slits, and he was keenly sensitive to the flash of sudden movements. He held the reins in his left hand while keeping his right just above his revolver.
His revolver. It was the first time he’d thought that way. He’d given Pedro his due and the vultures were surely done with him by now, having picked him white and clean—a swarm of them taking flight after being frightened away by a stray gunshot, exposing a skeleton wearing a sombrero, which itself would eventually be taken by vultures of a more human kind. Nature isn’t wasteful. Dead men aren’t, by nature, possessive.
The gaps between buildings closed. Their closing pushed the fog above the town into a thick cloud that dulled the sunlight.
Although no people walked the streets, faces began appearing behind unclean window panes, taking stock of the stranger appearing in their midst. Women’s faces, children’s faces. Scared, scarred faces. Faces from a feuding town.
Fenimore came to a statue.
The horse and its clickety-clack stopped.
The road was bisected by another running left—where the buildings were squat and architecture more Mexican—and right—where a single man dressed in a navy suit was crossing from a barbershop to a notary’s office. Fenimore imagined this was the centre of Hope Springs. It was the kind of place where children gather after Sunday mass to torture scorpions with the converging power of magnifying glasses.
Beyond the statute, a two story hotel beckoned:
“The Olympus.”
The statue was of a man so tall that his head was barely visible on this side of the fog cloud and Fenimore had to look up to see the place where his massive legs joined together to form a marble crotch. He could have been Zeus. Except that his arms, whose hands both held revolvers, had been ripped off and laid in a cross at his feet, where a small, oxidised bronze plaque described him as:
Rafael Rodriguez
Founder of this here town.
May he live.
Between the statue and hotel stood a raised platform maybe ten metres by ten metres wide.
The man in the navy suit slammed shut the door to the notary’s office.
The horse upchucked on Rafael Rodriguez’ boots.
Fenimore pulled it by the reins, crossed the empty town square toward the hotel, tied the horse to a horse-tying log, grabbed the hootin’ gun from its special holster, and walked inside.
The lobby smelled of leather and polished steel. It was filled with ornate antique furniture and floating particles of dust but otherwise as deserted as the street. Still, a few voices floated in from behind closed doors and a hotel-keeper was leaning his elbows against a polished counter, flipping through the pages of a book. He paid no mind, but when Fenimore was a few steps from the counter, “Morning, there. Rooms available. Creative forms of payment accepted,” he said without taking his eyes off his reading.
“I need a room for tonight. I’ll have money tomorrow.”
“That’s not creative. That’s freeloading.”
“I’ll pay twice your regular rate.”
“That’s freeloading thinking you can take advantage of my greed.”
“I give you my word.”
“Got lots of those right here. Don’t need more.”
Fenimore growled and put the hootin’ gun on the counter. “There’s my promise, to go along with my word.”
The hotel-keeper slid his gaze from the book to the gun, and squinted. The gun piqued his interested. “Haven’t seen one like that before. It German?” Fenimore piqued his interest, too. “Haven’t seen one like you before, either. But you don’t look German at all.”
“The gun’s yours if I don’t pay by sundown tomorrow. And there’s a horse outside. Not a pretty horse, but it walks well enough when it’s sober. If I don’t pay, the horse is yours, too.”
Neither the horse nor the gun were Fenimore’s to bargain with, but on the other side of both was the timepiece, and that was Fenimore’s to bargain with, and he wanted the timepiece back, so he didn’t consider it wrong to let the hotel-keeper close his fingers on the hootin’ gun and hide it under his desk.
“Tomorrow by sundown,” he said.
A slight black-haired boy bolted down the hall, stopped in the lobby long enough to stare at Fenimore’s face, and scurried outside. Definitely one of the town’s scorpion tormentors, Fenimore thought.
“Don’t mind him,” the hotel-keeper said. He’d gone back to reading his book. “He’s everywhere.”
“The horse is tied up outside,” Fenimore said.
“Don’t care about the horse.”
Fenimore drummed his fingers on the hotel-keeper’s desk, right above the hotel-keeper’s book. “I care about a room. You going to give me a key?”
“Don’t suppose you care one way or the other where I put you…”
“As long as it has a tub and the possibility of it being filled with hot water, I suppose I don’t.”
The hotel-keeper reached below his desk, pulled out a key with “13E” etched onto it, and slid it toward Fenimore’s impatient hand. “Second floor, good view of the square.”
The key looked banged up. “And suppose I’m superstitious?”
“Then I can’t put you in any room above the first floor, and the first floor’s all booked.”
Fenimore wasn’t superstitious, but there was something about the hotel-keeper’s disinterested manner that made Fenimore want to spit stomach acid in his face. “Suppose you put me in the room next to 13E.”
“Would that be 13D,” the hotel-keeper said, looking up from his reading with a smirk, “or 13F?”
Fenimore dropped his hand from the table.
The hotel-keeper did the same.
With their hands hovering, hidden, above their respective firearms, they met eyes like men are sometimes wont to do: in silent, masculine and primitive battle—waged between male creatures since before the time men were turtles. To look away was to lose. To win meant to fill one’s eyes with more cold potential for bloody and merciless violence than one’s opponent.
Fenimore narrowed his eyes and snarled, and the hotel-keeper looked away first.
Both men raised their hands back to the desktop. The battle was over. The two turtles had established their hierarchy. Civility could ensue. The hotel-keeper flipped to page one hundred twenty three of his book. “Every time someone gets killed in one of my rooms,” he said, “I change the room number to thirteen. Such is the Ironlaw. Isn’t a room above the first floor that’s not thirteen.”
“Strange law,” Fenimore said. “Dangerous hotel.”
“Dangerous times.”
Fenimore swiped the key from the desk and put it in his pants pocket. It clanked against his seven coins. “Have somebody bring me up enough hot water to fill that tub.”
He climbed the lobby stairs and walked the second floor hall until he found 13E, into whose lock he inserted the banged up key after making sure he was the only one around. When he turned the key, the lock clicked like a successfully cracked safe, and Fenimore walked carefully inside. He kept the door open, however, until he was sure the room was empty. After he closed it, he slid off his poncho and tossed it onto the bed.
The mattress was hard.
Thick curtains were drawn across the window. Fenimore parted them to let in a hazy volume of morning light. The hotel-keeper had been right, the room did have a good view: of the back of Rafael Rodriguez’ ample thighs and his big ass and all the square around both, which was as empty and forlorn as when Fenimore had left it. Immediately below the window the Starman’s horse swayed on its four unsteady legs, having drank all the water in the trough in front of it.
Fenimore pulled off his boots, took off his shirt and stepped out of his pants. The boots he left where they stood, but he tossed the shirt and pants next to the poncho.
Being nude in the shady comfort of a hotel room was much different than spending four long days naked under the burning desert sun while being pursued by a deadly gang of double crossers. Only one of those nudities was pleasant. Fenimore tramped to the room’s small bathroom and, for the first time in weeks, looked at himself in the mirror.
The face that stared back wasn’t ugly, but it wasn’t the face he remembered. It was a dark face, ragged, with an unkempt beard and vengeance weather-beaten into its taut cheeks. It wasn’t the face his mother had loved—a son’s smiling innocence—but a man’s face, motherless and not to be trusted.
Fenimore spat into the sink and turned toward the tub, which was made of metal, and heavy. He grabbed an edge, sighed, and dragged the tub out of the bathroom, into the main room, where he positioned it next to the uncovered window. The only thing better than a long overdue bath, he told himself, was a long overdue bath with a view.
When he’d finished the dragging, he was so out of breath he realized that tiredness was taking its cumulative toll not only on his face but on his entire body. Still, the thought that tonight he would finally sleep long and well kept him sufficiently awake. Tomorrow he would make money, and making money was the first step of his plan. That his plan so far consisted of only that first step and a vague coda—the destruction of each of his six grimy coins—didn’t bother him. Patience was a virtue. Neither did it bother him that he didn’t yet know what he would eventually do with the seventh, pristine, coin.
Someone knocked on the hotel room door.
A woman’s voice said, “Hot water.”
Fenimore grabbed his revolver out of the holster lying on the bed, crept toward the door, waited a full minute with his back to the wall, then, setting his bare foot in the door’s path as a precaution, slowly turned the knob and pulled just far enough to create a crack through which to stick the revolver barrel and one of his bloodshot eyes. He saw the lovely back of the figure of a black-haired girl surrounded by several steaming metal pails. “Leave them,” he said.
For a second the girl was stunned—she froze. Then she turned to face the door. Fenimore had withdrawn the revolver from the crack but his eye remained.
He blinked.
The girl brought her smooth face so close to the crack that only the wooden thickness of the door separated her eye from Fenimore’s.
He licked his parched lips and swallowed the puddle of saliva that had gathered in his mouth. She batted the thick eyelashes of her brown eyes and smelled like honey and spiced Caribbean rum. It had been too long since Fenimore had smelled a woman.
“I was told to bring hot water and fill your tub,” she said.
“I can fill my tub myself.”
“I can fill it for you better than you can fill it yourself. I can fill it without wasting a single drop. I can fill it without any of it dripping on the floor.”
Fenimore felt his revolver harden.
There’d be time for women, he told himself. Maybe even tonight. Certainly tomorrow. The Starman had recommended a whorehouse. There was no point risking anything now, when his wits weren’t as sharp as they should be.
The girl pushed the door. He felt it stop against his ready foot.
“What’s the matter, you shy?”
Fenimore concentrated on keeping his foot planted. “Leave the water,” he said. It was a sentence that took more effort to say this time than it had the last. He imagined it would take even more effort if he were to say it a third time, and with each saying his engorged revolver would hate him just a little more.
“Don’t be that way, mister. I’ve been told to bring the water and fill the tub, and I sure do hate to disappoint. I always do as I’m told. Always. Truly, nothing makes me happier than to obey…”
A gruff voice said: “The girl’s got a point.”
It was a man’s voice. But, more importantly for Fenimore, it was a man’s voice behind him.
Fenimore sp—
“Drop the gun, then turn around. Nothing funny.”
Fenimore heard the click of a gun’s hammer being pulled back. “Drop it and kick it over with your heel,” the gruff voice said. The pressure against Fenimore’s foot grew by an extra pair of hands, magnified by two more hammer clicks from behind the door. Fenimore dropped his revolver and back-heeled it.
When the sound of the revolver sliding over the floor ended, he turned slowly around.
The man standing in front of him was short, squat and Mexican. He wore a large black sombrero that matched his immaculately waxed and curled moustache. In his right hand, he held a comically large pistol. In the background, a strong breeze ruffled the window’s heavy curtains and the top rung of a ladder was visible just above the bottom part of the window frame.
Behind Fenimore, the door to the hotel room opened and several figures poured inside.
The mustachioed Mexican looked at Fenimore’s face, then at Fenimore’s erection, then said, “Looks like you’re all cocked and loaded, stranger.”
Laughter erupted, which Fenimore didn’t share, followed by a rifle being dug painfully into the small of his back.
“Lola,” the moustachioed Mexican said, “be a good girl and show this gringo what he’ll be missing.”
The beautiful black-haired girl circled Fenimore, twirled a few times in her thin Spanish dress, which flared at the bottom edge, and assumed her position at the left side of the moustachioed Mexican. He wrapped his arm possessively around her waist.
“What do you want?” Fenimore asked.
“No entiendo, stranger. You ride into our town, take up in our hotel, and you ask us what we want. It seems to me that your gringo brain has it all mixed up. The question, stranger, is what do you want?”
Fenimore’s erection drooped, but he refused to let that, or the fact he was naked, lessen his glower. “I’m passing through.”
“He’s just passing through, Ezekiel,” Lola said. “We shouldn’t make trouble for passersby. They pass, and then they go on their way, isn’t that right?”
Ezekiel scratched at his smooth chin with his big pistol. He was pretending to be deep in thought. Lola kept her big brown eyes on him, pretending to be riveted. Fenimore hoped the pistol would go off blowing a hole through his jaw. The two other men who’d entered the room with Lola—goons, no doubt—chuckled at both performances like obedient henchmen.
“I don’t know,” Ezekiel said, before turning his attention and gun dramatically toward Fenimore. “Will you pass, and go on your way, stranger?”
“I will.”
“And passersby don’t cause trouble, else they wouldn’t be passersby any longer, but troublemakers.” Lola said.
“And you’re not a troublemaker, are you, stranger?” Ezekiel asked.
Fenimore said he wasn’t.
Ezekiel took off his sombrero and held it against his chest. He had a full head of almost artificially lustrous black hair. “Do you, stranger, swear to be a passerby and blablabla not cause any trouble in this here town of Hope Springs, and be gone and on your way by tomorrow’s sundown?”
“I swear,” Fenimore said, “on the memory of Rafael Rodriguez.”
Ezekiel shoved the sombrero back on his head and spat.
The goons spat, too.
“Gringo’s got a sense of humour.”
“Don’t got no gun, though.”
“And he won’t have his gun,” Ezekiel said. He brought his pistol to Fenimore’s face and started rubbing it against Fenimore’s beard. “Anyone swears not to make trouble doesn’t need a gun to not make trouble with, isn’t that right, Lola?”
“That’s right.”
If Fenimore wanted to grumble, he didn’t let his lips or vocal chords show it. He did still want that long hot bath and the water in the pails was cooling, and as much as he hated having ridden into town with two guns and being left, temporarily, with none, it wasn’t an insurmountable hatred.
“And when I leave town—before tomorrow’s sundown—where do I pick up my revolver?”
Ezekiel removed his pistol from Fenimore’s face, spun it twice, and shoved it expertly into his holster. “When you’re ready to leave, you come calling on la casa Picasso.” He extended his left arm and pointed. The arm was too long for his body, like a guerilla’s. “Walk that way. You’ll come to a big white house with red shingles on the roof. Hop up the front stairs, knock, and then get on your knees like a good gringo and say you’re the stranger passerby got his gun taken away by Ezekiel Picasso.”
“Entiendo?” Lola said.
“Yeah.”
“It’s good to come to common understandings,” Ezekiel said. He took a few steps toward the window and kicked the rungs of the ladder that were sticking above the bottom part of the window frame. The ladder crashed to the street below.
The henchmen chuckled.
Lola lifted her arms so that Ezekiel could put his arm around her waist again, and the four of them left the room.
“Also,” Ezekiel yelled from down the hall, “I slit your horse’s throat.”
They all laughed.
The laughter faded away.
Only the pails of water remained in the hall. They were still steaming as Fenimore carried them into the room one by one. Although he had felt no sentiment towards The Starman’s horse, something about the throat cutting riled him, and he had no need to look out the window to see if it was true. He’d been told enough by the timbre of Ezekiel’s laugh. Boys who roasted scorpions grew up to be men who slit the throats of horses. The reasoning behind both was the same: because they could.
Once all the pails were inside, Fenimore closed and locked the door and poured the hot water into the tub. Once the tub was full, he got in. He enjoyed the relaxing change of temperature, and reclined until his back rested against the curve of the tub. He then lowered himself until only his head and the tops of his knees were above the surface of the water. Then he submerged those, too.
Underwater, the world was silent and slower.
When he came back up for air, his skin felt cleaner and he combed his hair back from his face with his hands. He washed his beard, his eyes, and the desert sand from between his toes. He scrubbed the remnants of the last few weeks from his body and watched them settle on the bottom of the tub like coffee grinds.
Through the window he saw three men drag The Starman’s dead horse’s body across the square. After they’d pulled it off the main street, they maneuvered it up a ramp onto a wagon, and the wagon master whipped his two living horses and the wagon pulled away. “Fresh Meat” was scrawled onto its side.
The slight black-haired boy whom Fenimore had seen in the hotel lobby ran across the square, between Rafael Rodriguez’s legs. He looked up at Fenimore’s hotel room window, smiled, and ran off. Even still he gave the impression of being in perpetual motion. The whole world was in perpetual motion. The water in the tub was comforting. Fenimore drifted between thoughts, fantasies and sleep, and as the water cooled, the sun rose from morning to midday, burning away the fog and bringing Hope Springs into ever sharper focus.
By ten o’clock, people started to gather in the square.
By eleven, the water in the tub was so cold that Fenimore started shivering. He stepped out, dried himself with a cloth and threw his clothes into the water to finally rinse and squeeze the dead Pedro out of them.
By noon, the laundry was done and drying, and the square teemed with bodies. Fenimore took the cigar that The Starman had given him, lit it with an old match and leaned against the wall next to the window, smoking and watching. He needed to find work. Down there was the person who’d give it to him. The trick was to find that person.
At least judging by the activity in the square, most of the regular inhabitants of Hope Springs were women and children. Regular inhabitants were of little interest. They lived their lives honestly, with their heads hung down, and their joy held close to their chests. They barely had enough money for themselves, so could offer little to anyone else. Whatever happened, they just went on with it. There was a sad purpose to their movements: buying food, selling wares, hoping their latest disease wouldn’t be their last. But that this was so in Hope Springs didn’t strike Fenimore as strange. It was so in every town he’d ever visited.
The lack of men was, on its own, also not unusual. Men often worked during the day. This wasn’t unique to Hope Springs. What was unusual was that the men who did appear, weaving between the women and children like slavers, held their chins high and their hands close to their revolvers and were distinguishable into two groups. The men belonging to the first had darker skin and wore more colourful clothing than those in the second. The men in the second were pale-skinned by comparison, often lighter-haired, and dressed in identical long grey coats. That one group suspected the other was as apparent as the disdain with which both treated everyone else.
Fenimore took a long puff of his cigar. He had no doubt that Ezekiel Picasso fit squatly into the first group, which meant he more easily pictured himself doing work for the second.
He held the cigar out the window and let a few centimetres of ash fall below, where the street was stained with horse blood. The Starman’s suggestion of honest work in Gulliver’s Participle flickered briefly through Fenimore’s mind, but he’d never been good at digging ditches. Even when Ulrich had made him dig his own grave, he’d been so piss poor at it that Butcher Bellicose got impatient and grabbed a second shovel to dig it with him. All while she watched them dig—watched him dig. If only he’d found himself a woman who lived with her head down. If only he’d…
His daydreams were interrupted by a commotion and the stomping of hooves.
Three grey-coated riders rode into the square.
Fenimore reached instinctively for a revolver that wasn’t in his holster.
The people in the square parted to make way for the riders, whose horses reared and stopped in unison. On the back of one of them sat a man with bound hands whose skin was covered by so much black soot that he looked like a shadow. The grey-coated riders dismounted and pulled the shadow to the ground behind them. He landed with a groan that could have come from the square itself.
They marched him onto the ten metre by ten metre raised platform.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the riders said, “it is time for the redemption.”
The crowd cheered.
The shadow crawled forward.
“This man,” the rider continued, “was caught last week stealing mining rations. Caught, I remind you, stealing them from you, from your husbands and your sons. This man”—The shadow got momentarily to his knees, then dropped back to his chest, still crawling.—“considered his luxury to be more important than your needs. Because of his thievery, others went hungry. Because of his selfishness, others risked injury and death.”
The crowd hissed—
With the exception of one plain woman, who rushed forward, clambered onto the platform and fell upon the shadow, hugging him with as much love and affection as she could muster, sobbing, “Joseph, my beautiful, beautiful Joseph…”
The crowd drowned out her sobs with curses and spit.
“He has a name,” the rider said, “but does that make him innocent?”
“No!” the crowd erupted.
“You know the law. This man has already been judged guilty. The punishment for theft is amputation of all four limbs.”
“Cut ‘em off!” someone yelled from the anonymity of the crowd.
“And his pecker too!”
Fenimore let another column of cigar ash tumble to the ground below. He watched with special interest the reactions of the few dark skinned, colourfully-clothed men who were watching the spectacle unfold from beyond the mass of the crowd. There were three of them, and all three were disinterested and neutral.
The rider was saying, “But mercy can still be showed this man, because mercy is good and the law, being better than any man, is merciful.”
The slight dark-haired boy was there, too.
“Is there anyone who, in the name of mercy for this criminal, will take punishment upon himself?”
All eyes converged on the woman who was sobbing into the shadow’s sooty chest. When she returned their gaze, half of her face was shadow, too. “He’s my husband,” she cried “I will take his punishment.”
Fenimore pressed his cheek against the cold stone wall. Once, someone had taken a punishment in his name, too. The circumstances were different, but the sacrifice had been the same. His jaws tightened. He felt as powerless now as he’d felt that day.
“Very well. The woman has made her choice. She has chosen to pay with her own pain for mercy to be showed to this man, Joseph, her husband.”
The crowd whistled and hissed.
“Do we accept her choice?”
The crowd clamoured.
“Do we accept her pain?”
“Strip ‘er down!”
Two of the riders grabbed the woman by the arms and lifted her to her feet. The shadow clutched at her legs. “Don’t,” he was repeating, “Don’t, don’t…”
One of the two riders kicked him in the face.
He crumpled.
The rider who’d been orating strode toward the woman—the crowd tightened around them—retrieved a dagger from somewhere inside his coat, and sliced open the woman’s clothes: the top of her dress, exposing her sagging breasts, followed by the bottom, exposing her trembling legs, crotch and belly.
“Kill me,” the shadow wheezed.
Although the woman wasn’t ugly, there was nothing sexual about her to Fenimore. The riders and her own brave desperation had stripped her of that along with her clothes, which lay like detritus about her feet. To see her as an object of arousal felt to Fenimore a betrayal of his own history. Her nudity was tremendously moving, but except for her shaking and her sobs the woman didn’t move, nailed to the spot by her love of the body of the shadow beside her. As tears streamed down her cheeks, one clean, one sooty, not once did she look weak—not when the first belts were unbuckled, not when the first lashes arched her tender back, and not even when the full fury of the regular inhabitants of Hope Springs, Rhodes, women and children, fell upon her with the full goodness and approval of the law.
Fenimore backed away from the window and shut it. He drew closed the curtains. His hand was slightly unsteady, but he convinced himself that it was due to a lack of sleep.
His urge to fuck, which had been so strong in the morning with Lola, was gone, and somewhere along the way he had also lost his intention of visiting the whorehouse. At least for today.
The redeemed woman screamed.
Fenimore finished smoking his cigar and threw the stub into the tub. Although he’d satisfied his need for a bath and even washed his clothes, he didn’t feel cleansed. So much for hot water. Perhaps only boiling water would reach those places that still felt soiled.
He sat on the bed and let his fingers feel the chainmail that The Starman had sewn to the underside of his poncho. Ring by ring his fingers travelled, like on a rosary. But if The Starman thought this would ever stop a bullet, Fenimore wondered how the hootin’ gun managed to function. The chainmail wouldn’t even stop a stiff stab. The tip of any decent dagger would slip between the rings and penetrate the wearer’s flesh. If it penetrated in the right place, it would leave him bleeding out to die. The only type of attack the chainmail would be effective against would be a slice, and the days of sword fights were over.
Yet the poncho had value, even in its weakness. An illusion could buy a lapse in judgment, which could lead to a moment of indecision. And for a man who knows another’s weakness, a moment could be plenty.
By late afternoon, the redemption was over and the crowd in the square had cleared. Fenimore didn’t know what became of the woman or her beloved shadow.
In evening, the square was empty save for a few stray dogs and men—ones in colourful clothes or long grey coats, with heads held high and hands always hovering just above their guns. A feuding town was apparently no place for the arthritic.
As evening became night, shots rang out occasionally, sometimes further and sometimes closer to the hotel, but Fenimore didn’t pay much attention to them. His mind wasn’t presently interested in bullets. Behind drawn curtains, to the leisurely hiss of a lantern, he was manufacturing an idea.
Fenimore lay in bed until three hours past sunup, then put on his clothes, which had dried overnight on the back of a chair, rolled up his poncho and stuck it under his arm, and walked down the stairs to the lobby of the The Olympus, where the hotel-keeper was standing at his desk, flipping through the pages of the same book as yesterday and wearing the same apathetic expression. “Found my money yet?” he asked.
“Tub water’s gone cold.”
Outside, the sun was bright. There was no trace of fog. The Starman’s horse’s blood had mostly faded from the surface of the dirty street. One more day and it would as if the horse had never lived and never died.
Higher, Rafael Rodgriguez’ marble head and wounded shoulders contrasted with the clear blue sky.
In the square around his broken-off, revolver-wielding arms, regular people were milling. They were the same people who’d milled yesterday, but being among them was different than looking down on them had been. This morning, their bodies pressed against Fenimore’s and he felt their heat, their fear and their confusion.
The raised platform was empty, but a few of the more commercially minded millers had put up makeshift booths or overturned crates on which they’d laid out salable goods: apples, trinkets, old silverware, salt, ragdolls.
Fenimore browsed to kill time.
The ragdolls were ugly, the silverware unpolished. The apples were bruised and browning. Only the salt looked unspoiled, but Fenimore didn’t have money anyway, except for the seven coins in his pocket, with which he wasn’t about to buy something that came out of the ground.
One of the seller women yawned. “You ain’t from around here by the looks of you. Can I interest you in a fork?”
“Maybe you have a knife instead.”
“Nah,” she said, “ain’t allowed to sell those. They weapons, says the Ironlaw.”
“A spreading knife.”
She looked at him queer. “Don’t blame me. I don’t make the laws. I just follow ‘em on threat of punishment. If the Ironlaw says a knife’s a knife, spreading, cutting or otherwise, I don’t ask questions and I don’t sell it. You sure you don’t want a utensil?”
Fenimore had never seen a man spread another to death with a knife, but he had seen an angry wife stab a whore in the eye with a fork. Nevertheless, he declined the offer.
“Suit yourself. There’ll be plenty of takers later. A good fork always tugs at the purse strings.”
“At the redemption.”
“That’s right,” she said, smiling, and whispered, “speaking of which, I hear they got a real young one today. Got caught trying to run for it cross the desert. Didn’t make it, of course. And word is he’s an orphan, which is why I got my good wares out. Redeemin’ is all right, and everyone likes a good punishment, but there ain’t nothing like a bullet to the head to get people’s money flowing.”
“Is there a redemption every day?”
“Lately it’s so. Lots of crime in the world these days. Maybe a spoon?” She held one up.
“Ever heard of a man named Ezekiel Picasso?”
She let the spoon drop and crossed her arms under her breasts. “I ain’t got nothing to say about him or his family. Not a one good word.”
She looked around to make sure there weren’t any men in colourful clothing around, then leaned in closer and like any good gossip said something anyway: “Bandits, the lot of ‘em. Killers with cold blood. Not like the Rhodeses. Now, I know some of the folk, they get nostalgic for how it was in the days of the Rodriguezes, and I remember them days, too, but for me the Ironlaw is at least some form of culture and civilisation, which we never had under the Mexicans, if you know what I mean. And as a trader woman, I care about that. If you ask me, everyone keeps calling it a feud but there’s only side to back, at least if you got a good head on your shoulders and no bad ideas of your own inside. Know what I mean? The quicker those Picassos are all dead, the better for the rest of us.”
Fenimore was about to ask her about working for the Rhodes, when a Picasso goon strolled by and the woman shut up. Her thin lips wouldn’t budge. The goon slowed his stroll, eyed her with about as much affection as a fisherman eyes a barnacle, and continued on, eying Fenimore with the same plus a lip curling dose of savage distrust. Fenimore reflected it right back at him, curl for curl. He’d known plenty of men like these: stupid men. Sometimes bravely so—like Pedro—and sometimes suicidally so, the most dangerous kind, but mostly just wandering foot soldiers who got by on intimidation and raw numbers and who’d call a snakepit home just as long as they could be on the side of the snakes.
“Careful, gringo,” the goon said. “I see any more of your teeth I might be tempted to knock them down your throat.”
Fenimore smiled and bowed. “My apologies, senor. I’m a simple trader here for the business and show.”
The goon puffed out his chest.
“You don’t look like you’re selling nothing.”
Fenimore unwrapped his poncho and held it out for the goon to see.
The square was getting lively. Around them, people were hocking goods, banging pots and haggling over prices.
The goon said, “That’s ugly.”
“We can’t all be good looking.”
The goon scratched his head and contemplated, unsure whether that had been an insult or not.
“I wove it myself,” Fenimore said. “I’m a travelling weaver.”
“It’s still ugly.”
“I’m still learning the trade.”
The trader woman, who’d been watching them in silence, packed up her forks and spoons into her crate, lifted the crate, keeping it up with her knees, and ambled away bowlegged to find a new place to set up her shop. “Forks,” she called out, “Silverware, forks and spoons. I got them all…”
“I suggest you do the same, gringo. Else we might end up engaging in a confrontation.”
Fenimore noted the double holster the goon was wearing, each filled with a shiny revolver whose grip the goon had begun stroking with the tips of his fingers. The holster seemed to be standard Picasso issue. “You think I should stop weaving ponchos and start making forks?” Fenimore asked.
The goon widened his stance. “I said I suggest you do the same, as in take paces backward, gringo.”
Fenimore bowed again.
But when he straightened, the goon’s attention was already elsewhere: on the sound of incoming hooves. The grey-coated riders, whom Fenimore now identified as the lawmaking Rhodes, were arriving.
If he’d had a gun, Fenimore could have taken advantage of the situation to send a bullet into the goon’s belly to make a lovely commotion. Because he was gunless, the commotion would have to wait. He’d have to be more creative. Chaos would have to be patient.
The riders were followed by a cloud of thick dust, which overtook them when they reared to a stop and made it momentarily difficult to see and breathe. Fenimore lifted the poncho to his face. The crowd, which through the dust was but a single black mass, swelled and converged on the riders, leaving their ragdolls and trinkets unattended. The ones not already in the square ran out of the surrounding buildings. Fenimore moseyed over to the trader woman’s crate and slid one of her forks into his pocket. He’d found a good deal after all. Her bloodlust ran deeper than capitalism.
The goon had retreated to lean against the wall of a nearby building. He was focussed on the riders more than on Fenimore, who was focused on everyone. A few other Picassos lingered nearby, equally attentive but separate from the crowd. Fenimore wondered why the Picassos, if they were feuding with the Rhodes, acquiesced to the Rhodes making such a show of their enforcement of the law. Fenimore had seen his share of feuds and this struck him as unusual. This feud was cold. But he’d also seen that it doesn’t take much to turn from cold to hot what’s already dry, and the earth, Fenimore noted, dried quickly in Hope Springs. Things were prone to evaporating.
When the dust settled, the riders were in the process of unloading a bound figure from the back of one of their horses and prodding it up the platform steps. Although a potato sack covered the figure’s face, it was obvious to Fenimore that the figure was a man, and young. Perhaps the trader woman had been right about her orphan.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the riders said, “it is time for the redemption.”
The hooded man struggled against the two grey-coated Rhodes holding him by the forearms. Unlike yesterday’s shadow, today’s victim had some kick left in him.
The crowd roared.
Fenimore stole an apple to go along with his fork and glanced back at the Picasso goons, who were tense but disinterested. One of them fought with a fly that buzzed in the vicinity of his sweaty head. Two others, including the one Fenimore had talked to, just were. The three of them stood spread out about a hundred paces apart, one in the middle of the back edge of the square, directly behind the marble Rodriguez, and the two others in the back corners. If push ever came to shooting, they’d have an easy time blasting into the densely packed bodies in front of them.
Fenimore took a bite of the apple, which tasted as soft and rotten as it looked, swallowed one mouthful, and discarded the rest of the fruit. It was less edible than The Starman’s soup.
In the centre of attention, the Rhodes riders had forced the sack-headed man to his knees, but he was still fighting, still trying to save himself, though instead of words to go along with his stunted jerks, he just made sounds—bestial wails and inhuman ululations.
The Picasso in the middle of the square was the one playing catch with the fly, and that’s the one Fenimore approached. He did it with a smile, which was the inverse of the Picasso’s frown, and said, “Good afternoon, senor. May I interest you in a poncho?”
The question stunned him.
Fenimore lifted his arm and draped the poncho over it.
The fly settled in the Picasso’s greasy hair.
One of the riders backhanded the sack-headed man in the face. That shut him up. He fell backward. He hadn’t even seen it coming.
“The poncho,” Fenimore said, “do you want it?”
The trader woman felt behind her and felt wood where a metal fork should have been. Her nostrils flared.
“The man you see before you”—The sack was puffing out and contracting at the mouth. Blood was soaking into its light brown fabric.—“was a caught trying to flee his work duties.”
The crowd hissed.
The Picasso smacked himself in the head, crushing the fly, which fell to the ground, and said, “Why would I want to buy your poncho? I got more than one of my own. Better ones. I ain’t a poor man.”
The goon to his right, the one Fenimore had already irritated, took a few steps closer to his comrade. “Git back to up front where you belong,” he barked. “I told you we don’t need your weaving, and you don’t want our attention.”
The goon to the left glanced over. He was chewing on a long piece of dry grass.
The rider was orating: “…to abandon his duties as a citizen of Hope Springs, to avoid the lawful labour that is good enough for your sons, your brothers and your husbands. To transgress the Ironlaw. To freeload.”
“Hurt him deep!”
Fenimore inverted the poncho so that the chainmail was showing. It shone in the daylight. “You don’t have one like this.”
“What’s that?” the Picasso asked.
He extended his neck to get a better look. He shone in the daylight, too, like a kidney bean.
The goon was closing in on them. “I told you already, or don’t dumb gringos learn their lessons with nothing other than a beating?”
The other one spat out his grass.
One of the riders grabbed the bloody, puffing sack and pulled it off the figure’s head. The young face beneath was bruised gruesome. Its nose was broken and its swollen eyes slits, hurt by the light and defiant in the mad faces of the angry, merciless crowd.
“And what is the only just punishment for the crime of freeloading, for dereliction—nay, for complete abandonment, of duties that are necessary for the survival and thrival of this here our town, duties parcelled out in equal proportion to the abilities of each and performed by the majority for the good of the all?”
The Picasso fisted a bunch of the poncho. The rings of chainmail pressed against each other, making a sound like heavy rain. “Nah,” he said to the goon, whose hand was reaching for one of his two revolvers, “ain’t ever seen one like this before.”
He asked Fenimore, “It stops bullets or knives?”
“It stops both.”
“Death!” the crowd shouted.
The Picasso waved at the one who’d been chewing grass. He started walking on over.
“Death!”
The figure threw up on the platform floor, a mess of yellow, pink and white, then straightened its back without getting off its knees and spat words no one could understand through lips so purple, black and thick that they looked like a fish’s.
“Look what this—”
“Passerby,” Fenimore said.
“—what this passerby wants to sell.”
The goon snatched the poncho off Fenimore’s arm, tried ripping it apart, couldn’t, and he and his two comrades ogled the craftsmanship, as if the fact that poncho had withstood the goon’s strength meant there was truly something to it. “Says it’ll stop blades and bullets.”
The crowd roared with approval as the orating Rhodes removed a pistol from the inside of his grey coat and brought the end of its long barrel to rest on the kneeling figure’s forehead.
“Is there anyone who, in the name of mercy for this criminal, will take punishment upon himself?”
There was silence.
“If he says it let him show it,” the goon said, grinning and reaching for a knife he kept hidden in his leather boot. It was a curved knife with a carved ivory handle. It was, Fenimore had no doubt, stolen.
The grass-chewer watched with quiet interest.
“Put it on, gringo.”
Fenimore put on the poncho.
The Rhodes’ pistol travelled down the figure’s beaten face to the groove between its fat lips.
The goon slid the knife blade gently over the navy-white material of the poncho.
“Open your mouth, boy.”
The figure refused.
The goon slashed at the poncho. Fenimore narrowed his eyes. The blade ripped through the navy-white wool, but not the chainmail.
“Open.”
When the figure still refused, the Rhodes pulled back his pistol—and smashed it straight through the figure’s bloody teeth.
The figure recoiled, spitting white shards.
The goon sliced diagonally. But, again, the knife failed to penetrate the chainmail.
“Looks like gringo got weaving talent,” the grass-chewer said. He traced along the two cuts in the material that the knife had made, with his finger.
The goon tossed the knife from his right hand to his left and placed the former on his revolver, ready to draw. The middle Picasso stayed his wrist. “Boss said no shooting, remember.”
Fenimore pulled off the poncho.
“So, senors, what do you say, shall we do business?”
The goon glowered.
“One more try,” the grass-chewer said. “Toss me the knife.”
The Rhodes inserted his pistol barrel into the figure’s smashed mouth through what remained of his teeth. He inserted it so deep the figure gagged.
The goon switched his knife back to his right hand, sent it looping once above his head, caught it, then palmed the blade and threw it handle first toward the grass-chewer.
Fenimore saw his chance.
The Rhodes cocked his pistol.
The blade floated, slicing, through the air.
And in that one moment of anticipation, as the goon watched the knife and the grass-chewer waited for it and the middle Picasso followed its trajectory with the pupils of his eyes, as the crowd waited for the Rhodes’ trigger to be pulled and the figure’s young skull to be as smashed as his teeth, Fenimore:
Threw the poncho at the goon’s face.
Snatched the knife.
Spinning, drove it into the grass-chewer’s gut.
And, having spun behind the middle Picasso, unholstered both of his revolvers.
The poncho caught on the goon’s face like a net. He bent and clawed at it.
The grass-chewer clutched at the knife.
Fenimore pulled back the hammers of both revolvers.
The middle Picasso bent his legs.
Fenimore aimed one arm left—at the grass-chewer, whose tongue was flapping out of his mouth—and the other right—where the goon had managed to rip the poncho off his face—and fired one bullet in each direction.
Both bullets hit.
As the middle Picasso sprung himself backward, taking Fenimore with him.
The goon scratched weakly at his revolvers.
Fenimore and the middle Picasso landed on their backs on the ground.
The grass-chewer fell against the wall of the building he’d been leaning against. His boots kicked out at an unnaturally painful angle.
And as the middle Picasso tried to flip from his back onto his knees and chest, Fenimore lifted one of the revolvers straight ahead, squinted—and put a bullet into the knob on the back of the Rhodes orator’s head.
His knees buckled, his grey coat creased, he let go of his long revolver, which remained firmly between the figure’s teeth, and fell flat on his face on the platform floor beside the figure’s kneeling body.
The grass-chewer slid down the wall until the only thing propping him up was his head.
The crowd became a single, intensifying scream.
The goon pulled out his revolver with twitching fingers and with a weak wrist raised it to the level of his eyes.
Fenimore dropped his revolvers, grabbed the middle Picasso by his half-turned neck and scampered backward into the darkness between two buildings.
The goon’s head exploded.
Smoke spilled from the long barrel of a pistol held by one of the two remaining Rhodes riders.
Bodies ran.
In the narrow alley, Fenimore kept up the pressure on the Picasso’s neck. The Picasso tried to pry himself free. He couldn’t. He couldn’t breathe. Fenimore didn’t stop moving until he felt the comforting tap of a wall against the back of his head and knew he was as deep in the alley as the alley went.
The deepness dulled the noise of the chaos erupting in the square and amplified the hoarseness of the Picasso’s struggle to breath.
Through the vertical slit of light at the alley opening, Fenimore saw flashes of criss-crossing motion.
The Picasso was flopping like a boiled snake.
Fenimore flexed the muscles in his left arm, the bend of which further constricted the Picasso’s throat, and reached with his right hand into his pocket. His fingers dug through seven coins before finding the shaft of the trader woman’s fork.
They closed on it.
“Gringo,” the Picasso wheezed, “I’ll kill—”
But he didn’t have time to finish the sentence. Fenimore stabbed him in the neck with the fork.
The Picasso gurgled.
Blood sprayed out of four small holes in his skin.
Fenimore stabbed him again.
The Picasso flopped more weakly and his grip on Fenimore’s left arm loosened.
Blood now poured from eight fork holes.
Some of it got on Fenimore’s cheeks, into his eyes, his mouth. The blood was warm. It tasted of rusted iron.
Fenimore stabbed again.
This time, he kept the fork tongs buried inside the Picasso’s flesh until the Picasso’s blood pressure fell, the squirting became a trickle, and the Picasso—gripping, flopping, gurgling—finally stopped living.
When the commotion had hushed down and there were no more flashes at the alley entrance, Fenimore let go of the handle of the fork buried within the Picasso’s neck and stood up. He stomped on the Picasso’s stomach in case the dead man was faking it, but he wasn’t. There was no breath left in his chest.
Fenimore turned his back, lifted the dead Picasso’s legs to his hips, one on either side of him, and began the trudge through the alley to the square, dragging the corpse behind him.
As he got closer he heard three voices.
When he emerged from the alley one of them yelled, “Stop!”
Three Rhodes riders stood by the statue of Rafael Rodriguez—four if you counted the one Fenimore had shot, whose face was still on the surface of the platform. Except for the dead one, who was calm, they all gave the impression of having drawn the short straw, of not wanting to be there.
The headless body of the goon, still holding one of its revolvers, and the unnaturally angled body of the grass-chewer were where Fenimore had left them. Otherwise, the square was empty. The figure with the sack on its head was gone and the crowd had disappeared, though a few frightened faces did peek out from the surrounding windows.
Fenimore’s chainmail poncho was draped over the shoulder of the Rhodes rider, who repeated his command and cocked his pistol. “Stop.”
Fenimore stopped.
“I believe this is the man you’re looking for,” he said. The Picasso’s corpse had left a snaking trail behind him from being dragged.
“Drop him,” the Rhodes said.
Fenimore let the Picasso’s legs drop to the ground. They fell like pounds of flesh.
“Put your hands behind your head and step aside.”
Fenimore wasn’t one to argue.
The two other Rhodes kept watch on the street leading to the Picasso’s side of town while the third kept his pistol trained on Fenimore. The feud between the Picassos and the Rhodes, which had been cold, was heating up. A killing was apt to do that to a feud: kindle it. Fenimore was a decent arsonist.
Down the Picasso street and down the Rhodes street nothing moved except the wind, which had found a hole through which to whistle and enough loose grains of sand to pick up and twister around.
When Fenimore had moved far enough for the Rhodes riders to see the Picasso’s corpse, one of them asked, “Did you kill him?”
The fork in the corpse’s neck glinted.
“I did.”
“Why did you do that?”
“Because he killed a man,” Fenimore said. “He killed a man who was carrying out the law.”
The speaker moved closer without lowering his pistol.
“What’s your name?”
His long grey coat snapped in the breeze and the wind tossed dust into his eyes. Above his head, Fenimore saw the window of his own hotel room. Its curtains were open and the small black-haired boy’s face was behind the glass. The boy smiled and shut the curtains.
“Fenimore,” said Fenimore, looking ahead again.
“If you have a weapon on you, Fenimore, I advise you take it out and lay it on the ground. It’s against the law for strangers to carry weapons in Hope Springs.”
Fenimore pointed with his bent elbows at the dead Picassos. “What about them?”
“I advise you follow my instructions.”
“I don’t have a weapon.”
One of the other Rhodes took his eyes off the Picasso street, approached Fenimore, and patted him down. “He’s telling the truth,” he said after he was done. “Doesn’t have anything on him but seven coins in his pocket.”
“Where are you quartered?” the Rhodes asked.
“The Olympus.”
“And what’s your reason for being in Hope Springs?”
“I had things stolen from me,” Fenimore said, “outside of town, a few nights ago, by a man with big guns and a sombrero. Took my things but left my horse, which I rode into town, where I figured I might get a good night’s rest, food, and maybe find a week’s work to fill my pockets. Man at The Olympus put me up on my word, but another slit my horse’s throat, and now I’m here with no money and no way of riding out, with a debt to pay and not a way of paying it. You might say I’m still looking for work—more than a week’s worth now—to pay that debt, buy a horse and earn myself some travelling money.”
“It takes a certain kind of man to stab another to death with a fork. That’s not in every man’s nature. Where did you say you come from?”
“I didn’t.”
The Rhodes holstered his pistol. “Tell me, Fenimore. Are you competent with a firearm?”
“Competent.”
“Have you ever killed a man, before this afternoon?”
“Once or twice.”
“Were they lawbreakers, too?”
“Always.”
One of the lookouts whistled. A mob of Picassos had appeared at the end of the street.
The wind swept across the square.
The speaker said to Fenimore, “You can lower your hands. You’ve killed a man, so we’ll have to take you in and make sure you’re telling the truth. Being a law abiding man yourself, you understand. Due process demands it. But after that we may have certain work for you.” He looked at the dead Rhodes on the platform. “There’s recently been made a vacancy.” He looked at the Picassos growing larger on the street. “And we anticipate an increased workload.”
The two lookouts rounded up the four Rhodes horses. They lifted the dead Rhodes onto one and themselves mounted two others. The third Rhodes hopped onto the fourth horse, leaving only Fenimore with his feet on the ground. “Suspects walk,” the Rhodes said, and all fourteen legs set off at a brisk pace.
The Rhodes part of the town was as grey as their coats. The buildings were clean but plain, with an air of bureaucracy to them. They passed a barbershop and a notary, a Solicitor’s Saloon and something called the department of future development. They trotted beside a men’s fine clothing store, a savings and loans bank, and a square cement building that looked like a bunker and was called The House of Uncommons.
The further down the street they went, the more the riders’ faces relaxed.
At the end of street stood a haunted looking white colonial mansion surrounded by a thick concrete wall that made the mansion into a compound and made the compound look like a fortress or prison.
The four horses stopped.
Their three riders dismounted.
Fenimore saw the blue sky turning grey reflected in the mansion’s windows.
“Have you ever been north, Fenimore?” the Rhodes speaker asked when they were alongside each other.
“Once or twice.”
“Would you believe that they built this house in the New England and rolled it to this spot over the course of years?”
“No,” Fenimore said, “I wouldn’t believe that.”
The Rhodes stopped and grabbed him by the arm. “Hold out your hands for me. I’m going to have to tie them. Protocol, you understand.”
Fenimore nodded and the Rhodes tied Fenimore’s wrists together in front of his body. He tied them with rope, but not tightly. He left Fenimore’s ankles unbound.
There was a metal gate in the concrete wall in front of them and as they approached, the Rhodes yelled, “Antoninus Pius,” and the gate rolled open with a head splitting whine.
After the four of them had gone through, the gate rolled back into place. It was controlled by a mechanism of gears and pulleys operated by yet another man in a long grey coat. This one had a thick beard and wore goggles. Fenimore noted that on this side the concrete walls were fitted at regular intervals with metal ladders. However, no one patrolled their summits.
The Rhodes speaker led the way to the mansion’s front doors. Two guards with rifles kept watch on either side. He nodded to them as he climbed the front steps. “Mr Rhodes,” they said in unison. “Messrs Rhodes,” he said back.
They stepped aside.
He knocked on the right-most panel of the door—three light taps followed by a hard one—something clicked, at which point he waited—Fenimore counted five seconds—before grabbing the door handles and pulling open both doors at once to reveal:
A high ceilinged, beautifully furnished room at the top of which hung a spider web of a gold-and-crystal chandelier, whose reflection graced the polished hardwood floors, which gave the illusion of four, rather than two, sets of mirrored staircases leading to what Fenimore surmised must be the third floor. The entire interior smelled of pipe smoke and possessed the aura of a long forgotten past.
On the ground floor, two halls shot off to the sides and a heavy wooden door loomed ahead. Nearby, a pair of men in bespoke suits were drinking brandy and discussing something, seated on a steel bench with red velvet cushions.
The Rhodes speaker bowed to them. “Messrs Rhodes,” he said.
“Mr Rhodes.”
They looked at Fenimore, then at the speaker again. One of them said, “Justice Rhodes is waiting, and he is not pleased. They still have not found the young man.” The other added, “How is the shot Mr Rhodes?”
“Deceased,” the speaker said.
“A tragedy.”
They looked at Fenimore again.
“No,” the speaker said, “he’s not the one. He’s the one who caught the one who murdered Mr Rhodes.”
They looked behind Fenimore, where no other prisoner was waiting. “Caught and executed,” the speaker corrected himself. “With a fork to the neck.”
One of the men on the bench took a sip of brandy. “I see. Perhaps we should refine ‘weapon’.”
The other laughed. “The extent of human ingenuity, I do say.”
The speaker said something to the two riders who’d accompanied him into the mansion and then said to Fenimore, “You’ll be taken to a holding cell downstairs, where you’ll be tried. Afterward, you may be given what we discussed. Tell the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
The speaker excused himself, bowed to the seated men again, and walked toward the heavy door.
Fenimore felt the two riders grab his arms and the three of them walked the left hall together. They said nothing. He asked no questions.
The hall became a set of descending stairs that lead to the mansion’s underground. It wasn’t as richly decorated as the main floor had been. There were no chandeliers or velvet cushions, and the air was danker, which caused the wallpaper to peel off the walls. Everything seemed to be sweating.
The riders stopped Fenimore at one of many similar looking doors. He didn’t resist. He looked instead at the place where the doorknob had been replaced by a metal loop that was connected to another metal loop, this one attached to the doorframe by a single-dial padlock. The technology impressed him. One of the riders spun the padlock twice right, landing on 12, once left, landing on 1, and once more right, landing on 5. Fenimore remembered the combination: 12-1-5. Once the padlock was off, the rider opened the door and pushed Fenimore inside.
The door shut.
The padlock was replaced.
The room was barren. The only light came from a small rectangular window near the ceiling. Too small for anyone but a child to crawl through, it was nevertheless reinforced by vertical steel bars.
Fenimore took a seat on a chair—the only furniture in the room—set his bound wrists on his lap and wondered whether he’d gotten himself into a bad spot. The wondering made him uneasy, so, like he always did at times like these, he started thinking. After a few minutes of thinking, he decided there was no reason for the Rhodes to kill him or even keep him locked up. If they’d wanted to kill him, they could have done it when he’d come out of the alley. Therefore, he reasoned, he was safe. He might also be on the verge of finally making some money.
He reasoned that way on the chair for hours.
His stomach grumbled.
Through the barred window he saw the day pass and the daylight become evening light.
Then the padlock clicked open, the door was swung, and the Rhodes gatekeeper with the beard and goggles said, “It’s time for justice to be done,” and ushered Fenimore out of the cell, up the stairs, into the main room, past the bench with the velvet cushions where the two men in bespoke were no longer sitting, and to within a few paces of the thick door through which the Rhodes rider had entered in the afternoon. The door was made of mahogany.
Goggles knocked. “Justice Rhodes, I’ve brought the suspect.”
“I have brought,” a deep voice said.
Goggles squirmed.
“Well, enter.”
Goggles bowed to the mahogany, saying much too quickly, “Of course, Justice Rhodes. I’m sorry, Justice Rhodes. As you command, Justice Rhodes.”
Fenimore imagined the deep voice sighing, and found himself doing the same, realising that he was getting tired of doors—open or closed—as Goggles gently opened this one, bowed once more, and left.
“Please close the door behind you,” the deep voice said.
It was sitting with its back to Fenimore in a steel armchair, behind a wide steel desk, facing a steel fireplace in which half a dozen logs and a few hundred sheets of paper were burning. Indeed, almost everything in the room was made of steel, including the floor, the walls and the ceiling. The voice, too?
Fenimore closed the heavy door.
The voice spun in its armchair. It belonged to a human body, flesh and bones, about sixty years old, dressed in an elegant grey suit, with a head of short silver hair above a creased, masculine and handsome face. “Good evening, Fenimore,” the voice said. “My name is Justice Iron Rhodes. Welcome to Hope Springs.”
Fenimore said nothing.
A portrait of a red-headed woman holding a green parasol and gazing wistfully out of the frame adorned the wall behind Iron Rhodes. The woman was beautiful, and the surrounding steel only made more vibrant the red and green pigments with which she’d been painted.
Iron Rhodes smiled. “A man of few words. That is admirable.”
He rose out of his armchair to a height of over two imposing metres. Standing, he was one of the tallest men Fenimore had ever seen. He offered Fenimore his right hand for the shaking.
Fenimore raised both of his, which were still tied.
“Right, let us dispense with that first. You have been accused of killing one Marcos Ulrida, a known associate of the Picasso family. How do you plead?”
“Not guilty.”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that he killed a lawman and didn’t deserve to live.”
“So you admit that you killed him.”
“Justice killed him, acting through me.”
“Are you a tool through which justice often acts?” Iron Rhodes asked.
“I don’t often kill.”
Cold radiated from the steel insides of the room. Fenimore shivered. The underground cell had moistened him up.
Iron Rhodes took two massive steps and was at a steel bookcase. “Do you often read?”
Fenimore scanned the spines of the books whose letters were big enough for him to see: Roman histories, engineering texts, a shelf devoted to books about the law, and snuggled just below, The Opening of the American West by J.S. Taki. Fenimore’s heart contracted. The Opening of the American West wasn’t a popular book. Master Taki was not a popular author.
“I know my letters, but I don’t often find the time necessary to read them.”
“Yes, it must be difficult.” Iron Rhodes picked out a book, opened its leather covers and palmed through the pages, as if looking for a specific passage. “For a man with no home to find the time to read, I meant to say. It is a pity.”
“Books are heavy.”
“Forks,” said Iron Rhodes, “are lighter.”
He closed the book without finding what it was he was looking for, if anything, and placed it back on the shelf. “Lately I like Frenchmen,” he said, “Frenchmen who have come to America and written about it. I find their thoughts amusing. Outsiders have acute perspectives.”
“Am I still a suspect?”
Iron Rhodes rubbed his hands together. “I have decided to reserve judgment. I will need time to consider the facts and apply the relevant law. But tell me, how did you know where to stab him?”
“In the neck,” Fenimore said. “It’s soft.”
The fire crackled.
“And full of blue, exposed veins. I am aware. Why were you not in the crowd watching the redemption? A stranger like you, were you not curious about what was happening? It is a unique feature of the Ironlaw, that is to say our law here in town.”
“I’ve seen executions.”
“And so you were loitering in an alley between two empty buildings…”
“It was a hot afternoon. It’s cooler in the shade.”
“Perhaps looking for a way inside…”
“Are you saying I’m a thief?”
“I am not saying anything. I am merely thinking out loud in place of the prosecutor. As you can see, we seem to be missing that cog in the judicial machine.”
“We also seem to be missing witnesses.”
“Oh, there are witnesses. I read their statements. I had them give statements as soon as they were able. Allow me to recite: ‘And when he came out of the alley he was dragging the Picasso’s body behind him, and when he moved away I saw a fork stuck in his neck.’” Iron Rhodes chuckled. “My men may not be the most eloquent writers but you cannot deny that they have a usefully blunt style.”
Fenimore didn’t deny it.
“Unfortunately for the prosecution, they also have poor memories and have by now forgotten what they saw this afternoon. And their statements”—He gazed into the fire, where the pages had disappeared into black ash.—“have all been mislaid. Did you know that the American law distinguishes between what is lost and what is mislaid?”
“I killed him,” Fenimore said.
“Your honesty is admirable. However, it seems to me that he may have mislaid his life rather than lost it, which is a fascinating legal question. As I said, I will reserve judgment. Until such time as I give it, you are absolved of your sins and peace be with you, or whatever are the magic words the Churchmen say. Now let me separate your praying, servile hands.”
Fenimore held up his bound wrists. Iron Rhodes flicked open a small knife and cut through the rope.
When his wrists were free, Fenimore said, “The man who brought me here said you may have a need for someone with my skills.”
“Someone with your respect for justice.”
Fenimore failed to see the difference. “I have a hotel bill that I gave my word I’d pay tonight and I don’t have the money to pay it.”
“It has already been taken care of. A long time ago, the hotel-keeper and I came to an understanding. I say, he does. What other skills do you possess? For example, I have been told that you are a competent marksman.”
“I’m better with a rifle than with a revolver, and better with both than with a fork.”
“And what about your moral views, Mr Fenimore?”
“What about them?”
“Have you any?”
“I wouldn’t slit a horse’s throat,” Fenimore said, “unless I had to drink its blood to survive.”
“I have not heard of that particular moral conundrum. Is it a Catholic tenet, something inane and allegorical thought up by St Francis of Assisi perhaps?”
Iron Rhodes boomed out laughing and smacked Fenimore on the back. The laughter reverberated. The smack stung. Fenimore’s skin was still sunburned.
Iron Rhodes went on: “I find Catholics amusing, just like niggers. They are such perfect followers. You know, I asked a Catholic once, ‘Why do you believe in the Bible’? He said, ‘Because it’s the word of God’. So I asked, ‘And why do you follow the law’? He answered, ‘Because it’s the word of Man’. Naturally, my third question was, ‘My dear fellow, then what don’t you believe in?’”
Fenimore didn’t smile. Iron Rhodes asked, “You are not one of them, are you?”
Fenimore said he wasn’t, and that he wasn’t a nigger, either.
Iron Rhodes said that that was good but that their conversation was drifting off course, for which he accepted the blame, for it was not often that he had the chance to talk to a stranger in town.
Fenimore asked about work, and Iron Rhodes said that he could certainly find a use for a good marksman who could read, would not slit a horse’s throat unless it was to drink its blood to survive, and was neither a Catholic or a nigger. He also said several unimportant things. After he was done saying them, he asked, “Are you not curious why I trust you?”
“Because I’m honest.”
“An admirable guess, but untrue. I do not trust you. However, because you are a stranger you have no loyalties, and where there are no loyalties dependence rules.” He narrowed his grey eyes. “Because we have no history, you and I, our actions are based solely on reason, and if I were to pay you to perform work for me it would be in your reasonable interest to perform it. Would it not be divine to shed our common Catholicism, shall we say, and live in a world guided fully by such mutual self-interest? It would be a clockwork world, a predictable world, which despite the prevalence of all the lofty and learned talk about justice”—He swept with his hand across the metal shelf where his law books lay.—“is the true goal of any legal system. Whereas God speaks from burning bushes and rises from the dead, the law is clear to all and always confirms the finality of the grave.”
He laughed again. “And once more I apologise, for I am ranting like a priest. I have no doubt that you are hungrier in the gut than in the mind today. Come, we shall feast and then we shall find you clothes, and a horse, and a rifle, and, with rifle in hand, we shall have you sworn in as a solicitor and official member of the bar of Hope Springs.”
Iron Rhodes swung open the heavy door as if it weighed nothing and strode under the chandelier, which passed far less above his head than Fenimore’s. They walked out of the mansion, beyond the gate and into the street. Wherever Iron Rhodes went, men bowed their heads and said, “Justice Rhodes.”
They entered the grey cement building called The House of Uncommons. It was padlocked like the cell in the mansion. Fenimore noted that the combination was the same: 12-1-5.
The building was a storeroom. Nobody was inside. Supplies were sparse. Fenimore waited while Iron Rhodes pawed around for a few minutes, before emerging with two pairs of grey cotton pants, a much cleaner white shirt than the one Fenimore was wearing, several pairs of socks, a grey vest, and the signature Rhodes long, grey coat. “Wear it,” he said.
Fenimore changed into his new uniform.
“The colour becomes you,” Iron Rhodes said, and passed Fenimore a government issue rifle.
When they were back outside, evening had become night.
They stepped inside the Solicitor’s Saloon, where the lights were bright and a man was playing Bach on the piano. They ate and drank to the accompaniment of the music. It had been weeks since Fenimore had had a real meal. It had been years since he had heard Bach. His father used to listen to records while he was inventing, when Fenimore was still a boy, the memories were flooding back, and then—
The stars had scattered across the sky and the air was crisp. Fenimore remembered The Starman.
They walked further down the street in the direction of The Olympus and the square until Iron Rhodes approached one of the buildings, took a key out of his pocket, and unlocked the front door.
It was dark inside. Iron Rhodes lit a candle. Under its flickering light, he retrieved a large scroll of paper, a quill and ink. After he’d dipped the quill in the ink and as he was about to put the former to the paper, he asked, “Fenimore—is that your first name or your last?”
“It’s my only name.”
Iron Rhodes shrugged. “I suppose it hardly matters.” He wrote on the scroll, and put the scroll back in its place.
He blew out the candle.
“Raise your hand,” he said to Fenimore.
“I don’t do oaths,” Fenimore said.
“In which case, I pronounce you Fenimore Rhodes, an officially recognised solicitor of the Hope Springs bar. There is more to it than that, but it is dark and I do not remember the words.”
Fenimore didn’t feel any different. “What kind of work do you need done?”
“An eager solicitor…”
“A reasonably self-interested one.”
“The French are right—about America, I mean. But I digress. There are two orders of business that need to be promptly taken care of. First, the man who was being redeemed this afternoon—he is missing. He needs to be found. The second order of business is something special for you, Mr Rhodes.”
He pulled a folded up sheet of paper from the inside of his suit jacket and handed it to Fenimore. Fenimore couldn’t read it in the dark.
“It is a resolution of the government of Hope Springs. It reads, more or less, ‘Pablito Picasso must die’.”
“Who is Pablito Picasso?”
“He is not a horse.”
“How will I recognize him to kill him?”
“It will not be difficult. He is everywhere, he is a spy and he is eleven years old.”
Fenimore remembered the black-haired boy from The Olympus, the redemption and his own hotel window. He remembered the boy’s perceptive eyes and sense of perpetual motion. The folded up piece of paper felt leaden in his hand.
“Locate the criminal, kill the boy,” Iron Rhodes said. “I will pay you $200 for each successfully completed task.”
With that, he bid Fenimore goodnight.
It was a short walk from the notary’s office to the Hotel Olympus, but Fenimore stayed alert. He wasn’t sure what, or how much, the Picassos knew. He suspected they knew nothing, but he wasn’t willing to risk his life to find out. He kept to the deepest shadows. The square and the hotel were neutral territory, and men had been known to drown in neutral waters.
A single grey horse stood tied to the horse-tying post at the hotel entrance. When Fenimore climbed the steps, it lifted its head from the water trough, blasted steam from its nostrils and stared at him with melanitic eyes.
The hotel-keeper was also staring when Fenimore walked in, but not with surprise. He reached under his desk and pulled out the hootin’ gun. “We’re fair and square, Mr Rhodes,” he said. “And a bath’s been drawn up for you upstairs. Hot water in the tub, just like you like. I’ve also changed the locks on your door. It was brought to my attention that the previous lock may have been compromised.” He passed Fenimore a shiny new key. “If you need anything, please let me know how I can be of further service.”
“The horse,” Fenimore said. “Another lodger?”
“No, Mr Rhodes. The horse is yours.”
Fenimore picked up the hootin’ gun—over the past few days his weapon count had fluctuated, but he was glad to have two guns again—and carried himself up the stairs to the second floor hallway. The hallway was empty. The new key fit snugly into the lock of room 13E, and Fenimore opened the door.
He peered into the darkness.
Nothing.
The silence was so profound that he could hear the hiss of the steam coming off the surface of the water in the tub.
He closed and locked the door and was about to pull off his boots and his fresh set of mostly grey clothes to make the best use of the tub water before it turned lukewarm, but as he bent down to reach for the boot heel, he noticed that an envelope had been placed on the pillow of his bed.
He picked up the envelope.
He pulled the curtains open to make sure no ladder was resting against the top of the window frame.
It wasn’t.
In the faint moonlight, he saw the words “Dear Stranger” written on the envelope in beautiful, looping cursive. He turned the letter over and brushed the wax seal with his fingertips. It was unbroken. “R.R.” it said. He broke the seal and removed a single folded sheet of thick paper. On the paper was written:
Dear Stranger,
Your appearance has not gone unnoticed. You are hereby cordially invited to attend at the Sugarcane brothel-house at a time of your choosing for introductions, interrogations and other related pleasures. You shall find the address by asking, or else by walking out of your hotel and turning right. I suggest you do not dally.
Yours faithfully,
R. Rodriguez
Sole Proprietress
P.S. You may be in danger.
Fenimore folded the paper and slid it back into the envelope, which he placed back on the pillow.
He knew he was in danger, so he disregarded the postscript and weighed his desire to soak against his desire to fuck. He sided with the latter. Although images of the redeemed woman sprinted through his head, they were no longer vivid or powerful enough to stop the flow of blood to his cock. The redeemed woman was merely a memory. The thought of fucking no longer made him feel guilty.
Fenimore exited the hotel and turned right.
Because that meant going in the direction of the Picassos, he paused by the horse—his horse, apparently—to see if he could spot an ambush. The street was empty and the Sugarcane, all things considered, wasn’t far. He slipped from building to building until he reached it, at all times too cognizant of the grey coat he was wearing.
The brothel sounded like noise, music and laughter even before he was level with its swinging doors.
Once through them, the cacophony hit like an unexpected right hook. The brothel was as busy as the town square during a redemption, and the only place in Hope Springs where he’d seen even a trace of joy.
Black-sooted, grey-coated and colourfully-clothed men played cards and sang together, tilted back mugs of foaming beer until the foam ran down their cheeks, and squeezed the ample bottoms of serving girls, whose eyes were precisely as sober as the men’s were dull. Granted, the men sat mostly with their own kind, but there was no shooting, no punching and only the occasional ill-natured curse—and even that was usually directed at an inopportune flop.
In the background, a piano player stomped his feet and banged out an imprecise rhythm, which a fiddler was furiously trying to transform into a melody. Beside them, a guitarist had fallen asleep with his head in a whore’s lap. The whore nodded her head and tapped gently against his shoulder in tune with the music but otherwise had the decency to let him sleep.
To the side stood a bar stocked generously with whisky bottles in various states of fullness and a pair of buxom barmaids, the bounce of whose meaty breasts the men seated along the bar on stools followed with wagging tongues.
Yet it was the older woman behind the commotion—one clad entirely in black and perched atop stairs that Fenimore guessed led to the rooms where the brothel earned its purest profits—that finally held Fenimore’s attention. There was something regal and timeless in her pose that made it impossible to look away. She was a queen overseeing her kingdom, a goddess protecting her flock, a dominatrix choosing her whip. She was, and could be, anything you wanted, because each role, each incarnation, was as false as the last. The woman was potential personified. Her pose was refined, her manner of striking it rehearsed. She was a natural actress.
She shifted her gaze from the men at the bar to Fenimore standing by the doors as lazily as if the interior of the brothel had been submerged in honey.
When she saw him she feigned surprise, which she followed with a theatrical, “Oh, you’ve come,” and an excessive flutter. Next, without losing an ounce of her artificial regality, she descended the stairs to rub elbows with the plebs and hold out her limp wristed hand to her latest guest.
“I’ve been expecting you,” she said. She looked Fenimore up and down in all his greyness. “Mr Rhodes, Please leave your rifle with Olivia.”
One of the buxom barmaids, having heard her name spoken, started making her way over. The wagging tongues followed.
“And follow me upstairs. I’m sure you’ll find something there to your liking.”
Fenimore parted with his rifle and ascended.
Everyone, it seemed, had his hallways. Some led to hotel rooms, others to underground cells, and others still past the sounds of wet coitus to a dreamy, underlit interior whose very appearance gave existence to the word gaudy.
“Take off your coat and have a seat on the bed, Mr Rhodes,” the Widow Rodriguez said. “I want to talk to you. Later, you can do more than talk.”
Fenimore hung his coat on a coat rack shaped like the intertwined bodies of two naked women, but remained standing. The Widow Rodriguez lowered herself onto the corner of the bed.
“Speak your mind,” Fenimore said.
Irritation stretched briefly across her lips, before the actress in her puckered them. She batted her long false eyelashes. “I had in mind more a conversation than a speech.”
“And I had in mind other things entirely.”
“Pointed,” she purred, “so I shall return the favour. Are you a mercenary, Mr Rhodes?”
The way she turned her head awaiting an answer reminded Fenimore of the one whose name he wouldn’t remember. Though older, the Widow Rodriguez shared some of the same pronounced facial features. He grinded his jaws to make the memory go away.
“If not that question, perhaps this: who’s made the move, Iron Rhodes or Ignacio Picasso?”
She rose briefly, fixed her dress, and sat down again. “I can keep you safe, Mr Rhodes. You must realise that. My establishment is one of the few truly neutral places in Hope Springs. I don’t allow for feuding. In fact, after what happened in the square today perhaps you are standing”—She emphasized the word. It was clear to Fenimore she didn’t like being disobeyed.—“in the only neutral place left. Now, a man born in Hope Springs, his allegiances are set. But a stranger, a stranger’s allegiances can be quite fluid. Let me liquify yours, Mr Rhodes.”
“Are you the widow of the late Rafael Rodriguez?”
“I am,” she said. “Rigoberta Rodriguez is my full legal name.”
Fenimore watched her slip from commanding mode to polite mode with no more difficulty than if she’d been switching bonnets. It was in the angle of the face and the shape of the eyes, and of course the innocent intonation. “So how did you happen to come to town? Was it on Iron Rhodes’ instructions?”
“What do you want, Miss Rodriguez?”
“Madam Rodriguez. And I know you arrived before today’s commotion. I also know that you were at the shooting and that you’re the one who killed one of the Picassos.”
“You didn’t answer me.”
“You first, Mr Rhodes.”
“It’s impolite to invite a guest only to interrogate him.”
“I believe you were warned, if I remember my invitation. You may have come for the pleasure but pleasure often comes with a price of pain. Or was I not explicit enough?”
She crossed and uncrossed her legs underneath her black widow’s dress. “So who shot first, Mr Rhodes—the Picassos or the Rhodes?”
“You don’t need me to answer that, Madam. There was a crowd full of eyes.”
“All of them rather conveniently focussed on the one same spot,” she said. She crossed her legs again, salaciously. Fenimore couldn’t help but admire her ankles. “I believe that’s referred to as misdirection, a sleight of hand, but I’m too old to keep confusing appearances for reality. Once bitten, no longer fooled.”
“Perhaps you’re seeing more than what’s really there.”
“Isn’t more always better?”
She hiked up her dress, revealing her legs up to her knees. Fenimore couldn’t say he didn’t look, but he also couldn’t say the performance was having its desired effect. It was too obvious, too blunt. “What’s your angle?” he asked.
“I prefer looking up.”
“From the top of your brothel-house stairs?”
“From my knees.”
And she slid off the bed, dropping to them, making her eyes big and moist and rubbing Fenimore’s legs through his clean cotton pants.
“I badly need your help…”
“I thought you wanted to liquify my allegiance.”
She pressed her cheek against his thigh and ran her hand up his back. “I will do anything to buy it, Mr Rhodes. I don’t know how much you know about the history of Hope Springs, but you’ve seen the statue, you know who my husband was, you know it can’t be easy for me. Tell me, please, who shot first, tell me when Iron Rhodes started paying you. You are a mercenary, a hired gun, aren’t you?”
Fenimore tried to shake her off, but she had a leech’s grip.
“Don’t, please. My husband was a good man. Hope Springs was a good town when he ruled. Now all we have is feuding, and there is no right side and no wrong side. They’re both no good. They’re both wrong. They’re both rotten all the way through. Help me make things right again.”
When she turned her chin upward, it was with a yearning for pity and a desire for kindness, not with sexuality. Her grip had become an embrace. “Sometimes it takes a stranger coming down to disrupt all the evil in the world.”
“Why do they keep you around, the Rhodes and the Picassos?”
Now her big eyes grew teary. Her voice started to choke on itself. “When they murdered my husband, when they butchered my family—”
“They did this together?”
“Oh yes, yes. The Rhodes and the Picassos, together, because it was the only way. Alone, each was not strong enough. They wouldn’t have stood a chance. The balance of power was against them, but they conspired, they made secret pacts, devilish pacts, to backstab and to kill and to take power by their combined might so that they could later divide it amongst themselves.” Her hands massaged his legs, his back, his crotch. “But after they had destroyed they could not construct, and they, each of them, wouldn’t give up the power once they had it, and so…”
“The feud.”
“And I’m just a statue to them, no more alive than my poor, late husband, kept like some kind of animal, for their amusement and as their trophy and a reminder to any who would try to restore the proper, God fearing order that no one can resist them, that resistance is suicide—”
“Tell me, Madam Rodriguez,” Fenimore interrupted, “how long have you been memorising that speech?”
Something clicked.
And Fenimore felt sharpness against his testicles.
“Long enough.” The tears in Widow Rodriguez’ eyes transformed instantly into venom. Hitting the whorehouse floor, they burned.
“If you move, make a sound or don’t tell me exactly what I want, I’ll cut your balls off.”
She rose without taking the knife off Fenimore’s delicates. Her lips moved to within a cock’s width of his. “The simplest way to a man’s heart is by cutting him open and sticking your hand inside, thrusting about until you find what you’re looking for. And the fastest way inside his head is through his neck, but perhaps you already know that, Mr Rhodes. Are you a mercenary?”
“I’m not.”
“When did Iron Rhodes first pay you?”
“He hasn’t yet.”
She pressed the knife harder against his testicles.
“Don’t fuck around with me.”
“He gave me clothes, a horse, and an assignment.”
“What’s the assignment?”
“I’m to find the man whose redemption the Picassos interrupted by killing the redeemer.”
“Why?”
“So that justice can be done.”
She moved her face even closer to his—and chomped down on his dry lips, drawing a trickle of blood. Fenimore’s eyelids twitched.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“And who shot first?”
“The Picasso.”
“You answer well when you’re motivated, Mr Rhodes.”
“And what motivates you?”
“Justice.” She laughed. “And a ledger, which may or may not exist and which may or may not disclose the identities of my late husband’s arms dealers. More fundamentally, and you are free to disbelieve me, I’m motivated by the desire to bring the past back to Hope Springs. I want the town to be well again.”
“Vengeance.”
“Good things can come from bad intentions,” she purred, and decreased the pressure of the knife against Fenimore’s testicles. “May I?”
Fenimore nodded. “I won’t scream for help.”
She clicked the knife shut and hid it back inside the sleeve of her dress. Fenimore resisted the urge to punch her in the face. “Where’s this ledger?”
“If it still exists, it’s in the possession of Iron Rhodes.”
“And you want my help in finding it?”
“I don’t merely want it. I’m prepared to pay for your help in finding it.”
“How much?”
“How much is Iron Rhodes giving you to bring him the head of that poor orphan boy from the mines?”
“Four hundred dollars.”
“Valuable orphan.” She hesitated for dramatic effect. “I’m prepared to offer you twice tenfold for delivery of the ledger, plus undefined ancillary duties.”
“What kind of duties?”
“The kind they pay men for, Mr Rhodes.”
Fenimore started counting 4,000 in his head, bill by American bill, but despite the numbness of the number, 4,000 wasn’t quite enough to eclipse his rational thinking. “Where can you get that kind of money?” he said, with only a slight delay.
“And here I was, all dolled up and afraid you were simply going to take my word.”
She crossed the gaudy room to a bed table, from whose drawer she retrieved a bundle of papers. She thrust the papers at Fenimore.
“Compton’s Investors, Inc.,” she said as he scanned through them. “It’s a company of Sliver City that’s interested in brothel-houses, even in out of the way places like Hope Springs. They have a fair number already. In Gulliver’s Participle they bought one just to scuttle it a few months later. Though what they want the places for isn’t my business. The ones they do keep they do up all the same way, have the girls wear the same uniforms in each, which kills character in my experience, but who am I to offer advice to those haven’t asked for it. The reality is they’ve been after my establishment for years but I’ve been holding off…”
Fenimore handed the documents back. They were legitimate. All that was missing was the Widow Rodriguez’ signature. “For the right time to sell.”
“You read my mind.”
“Why now?”
“Because despite that I may not understand the reason, one of the Rhodes and Picassos has acted. The other will no doubt react, which means that it has begun, Mr Rhodes. On the bloody final play for Hope Springs, the curtain has been raised.”
“And the guns.”
The Widow Rodriguez revealed her hidden knife and twirled it between her painted fingers. “Accordingly, I plan to be the unexpected third party at a table of two, with more than an ace up my sleeve.”
“You’re mixing metaphors.”
“And you’re cultured for a hired gun.”
“I never said I was I hired gun.”
“I hired you.”
“Not yet.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to turn down eight thousand dollars?”
He slapped her across the face.
“No.”
She slapped him back.
“Good, because that concludes tonight’s interrogation portion of the program. Up next: pleasure. Pick a hair colour, Mr Rhodes.”
Fenimore remembered the painting of the red-haired woman in Iron Rhode’s steel room. He also remembered Lola, whose black hair had fallen in deceitful waves. “Red,” he said.
The Widow Rodriguez cackled.
“My personal hatred of the Rhodes aside, I’ve stayed in business by following the law, not by flouting it openly in front of Rhodesmen.”
Fenimore didn’t understand being in a town that forbade butter knives and redheads. The Widow Rodriguez explained: “No woman living under the thumb of the Ironlaw is allowed red hair. If she has it she dyes it away. If she doesn’t have it she uses no dyes to get it. If she breaks either prohibition, she receives a public shaving and a dozen lashes to remind her that the law exists to be obeyed.”
“What if she’s protected by the Picassos?”
“My dearest stranger, the only thing a Picasso would do with a white woman was spit in her face or shoot her in her pregnant belly.”
“Or fuck her.”
“Every rule has its exceptions.”
“Is there an exception to the rule against redheads?”
“Perhaps if Katie O’Rourke rose from the dead.”
“Who’s Katie O’Rourke?”
The Widow Rodriguez crossed her arms and said, “The only woman Iron Rhodes ever loved.”
If she said anything more Fenimore didn’t hear it, because that’s when the gunshots and screaming started.
“All right, you motherfucking bitches, we’re lookin’ for a gringo goes by the name of Fenimore, so if you don’t want your cunts shot up, I advise you start talking.”
The voice was muffled, coming from downstairs. Fenimore hadn’t a doubt that it belonged to Ezekiel Picasso. What he was less sure of was the Widow Rodriguez’ role in getting it here. But watching her huddle on the floor against the safety of the bed wasn’t going to reassure him of anything. He pushed away from her, toward the door.
A bullet blew through the floorboards and exploded one of the pillows, sending its softness into the air.
“I says talk, senoritas.”
There was yelping, a scream, and a gunshot that put an end to both.
“Or another one of you gets it.”
Fenimore pressed his ear against the door and listened. He kept looking back at the Widow Rodriguez’, unable to figure out if her expression of fear was real or yet another performance. She kept her eyes on him.
The pillow feathers fell slowly through the air.
Fenimore heard walking on the other side of the door. Some of it was women’s walking, but some of it was boots with spurs, and he imagined the men in colourful shirts with their hands locked around the bends in whores’ elbows, jerking their bodies around, trying to find him and whatever else they might be looking for.
“Where’s the exit?”
He mouthed the words more than spoke them, but even his mouthing was hoarse.
“Downstairs,” the Widow Rodriguez said. “And if you think this is my doing, you’re wrong.”
There was another gunshot.
“Next.”
“My girls are dying down there because they’re keeping your secret.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Because they’re as tired of this feud as I am.”
Fenimore pushed a bookcase against the door, grabbed his coat, and sat down on the floor behind the bed beside the Widow Rodriguez. “Then they aren’t doing it for me. Still seems foolish, though, to choose death over life,” he said, but even as he said it he felt his heart tighten and he remembered his father. “How do I know there’s real murder going on?”
He didn’t know, but he had a damn good hunch those weren’t toy guns and theatrical panic he was hearing.
“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. There’s no need of a show when a blade in the back will suffice.”
He noticed she’d let her knife slide out of her sleeve and was holding it between white knuckled fingers. “What’s your plan?” she asked.
The commotion underneath was moving closer, climbing the stairs. One of the girls had probably spilled her guts.
“I figure they don’t want me dead, so I stay here. When they break down the door, I put up my hands and go willingly.” That wasn’t Fenimore’s plan. He didn’t have a plan. But he wanted to check the Widow Rodriguez’ reaction—if not for immediate benefit, then for the future. He needed to know how she fit into the grand scheme.
“They don’t want me dead, either,” she said. “So we’ll both wait, then we’ll both put up our hands and go willingly, but I’ve a feeling they’ll treat me better than they’ll treat you.” She twisted her neck to point at the window with her chin. “I may have lied about the exit, depending on your definition.”
Fenimore followed where her chin led.
“The drop’s not bad, straight into straw behind the building. You may also find a horse or two,” she said.
Fenimore crawled to the window and peeked over. He didn’t see any Picassos. He did see straw and horses.
“Do we have a pact, Mr Rhodes?” the Widow Rodriguez asked.
Fenimore got to his feet and took several steps back.
Someone banged on the door.
Then turned the handle.
Then the door hit the bookcase.
“The ledger and ancillary duties in exchange for money,” Fenimore said.
“Minus the price of the window—”
Fenimore ran toward it, put his hands holding his coat in front of his face, and…
He exploded through a shower of broken glass, swinging his arms to keep himself upright in the air, before dropping into a cushion of hay.
He rolled off and onto the ground, which wasn’t as soft. He stood and put on his coat.
The Widow Rodriguez watched him through the shattered window.
Fenimore stumbled toward the nearest horse, untied it from the post it was tied to, and lifted himself onto its back.
The horse whinnied but otherwise didn’t protest, and Fenimore went riding around the corner of the Sugarcane into the main street, where a few Picassos kept watch. Seeing Fenimore, they ran with their hands holding their sombreros down on their heads, and leapt onto horses of their own.
Fenimore’s horse’s hooves beat distance between him and them.
He turned at the square into the street down which he’d first come walking into town, with a drunken horse in tow and ideas about making money in his head.
He looked back.
Several pursuing Picassos whipped at their horses, hollering and following.
Fenimore sped past the grave-maker’s workshop and the town sign. His horse was good. He was leaving the pursuers behind. One of them lifted a revolver and shot, but missed wildly off the mark.
When Fenimore looked back again he was a few miles out of Hope Springs and couldn’t see the pursuers anymore. They’d either been left far behind or, more likely, given up the chase and returned to town. The Picassos wouldn’t want to leave themselves exposed to any Rhodes ideas by letting their men scamper about in the desert.
Still, Fenimore didn’t slow down until he reached The Starman’s cabin.
Its windows were dark.
Fenimore dismounted his horse and walked it to the side of the cabin that faced away from Hope Springs. Fenimore’s burro and another horse already stood there. The burro wagged its tail a few times. The horse’s saddle was dirty with dry blood. Fenimore tied his horse beside the other animals. Had The Starman been wounded?
He knocked on the cabin door.
“Starman.”
Nobody answered, but the barrel of a rifle—Fenimore recognized it as Pedro’s rifle—emerged from a concealed hole in the wall. “Rhodes, you fuck cunt, you step from the door or I step you from it with bullets.”
Fenimore remembered his grey clothing.
The Starman said, “You ain’t in Hope Springs no more, which means you ain’t the law. Goddamn, step away now or I blast you.”
Fenimore put his hands up. Although he didn’t know how, The Starman could see him. “It’s Fenimore,” he said. “I’m not a Rhodes. I’m just wearing their colours.”
The rifle stayed put, but there was silence. It was finally broken by:
“You kill a Rhodes to get it?”
The question sounded hopeful.
“No.”
“Show me your face.”
“Show me my timepiece.”
The rifle disappeared into the hole. The hole became concealed again.
The door opened.
The Starman, holding his rifle pointed at the ground, said, “But take off the greyness, cocksucker. I ain’t prepared to have it in my home.” He stuck his head past the entrance and peeked to the side. “Winnie,” he called. When there was no reply, turning to Fenimore he said, “Where’s Winnie?”
Fenimore had taken off his coat and was in the process of stripping out of his shirt. He still wore his pants. He stopped moving. It wasn’t usual that he didn’t know what to say.
The Starman’s eyes filled with expectation. Then, with each passing second of quiet, they drooped with increasing sadness.
“I got some coffee all brewed for her,” The Starman managed to say.
“She’s dead.”
It was a compromise. It was the truth, just not the full truth, and Fenimore figured it was enough to know the fact without being burdened by the details.
“Rhodes!” The Starman barked.
“Picasso,” Fenimore said. “Ezekiel Picasso.”
The Starman turned his back. Leaving the door open, he disappeared into the cabin, which was the sole distinguishing feature in the otherwise plain and dusty desert. Although Fenimore had seen it just a few days ago, it looked foreign to him. He folded his coat and shirt into a bundle, weighed down the bundle on the ground with a rock, and went inside.
A fire was going.
The Starman’s tables were as filled with gears, pulleys and other mechanical doodads as they’d been before. Fenimore didn’t see the timepiece. The only change he did notice was that several of the rolled up maps that had been leaning in the corner had now been unrolled and spread out. They weren’t star maps. They were land maps.
The Starman took a seat behind one of the tables. “Your skin’s still as burnt brown as it was,” he said without looking up, “and I wager you don’t got my hootin’ gun, neither. I warned you not to pay your visits to that feudin’ town.”
The fire crackled but gave off weak light.
Fenimore said, “Are you hurt? There’s a horse outside covered in blood.”
“If I am, it’s my own goddamn business.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You got no reason.”
“I’m sorry about Winnie.” Fenimore felt strange calling the dead horse by a name he hadn’t known it had.
The Starman clasped his hands behind his head. “I understand man being inhumane to his fellow man, but cunt almighty why be that way to a horse, which ain’t stepped a hoove wrong. Ain’t ever been a horse been evil the way man’s evil.”
“You killed my horse, too.”
Pain contorted The Starman’s face. “Yeah, I wager I did do that, didn’t I?”
Fenimore took a seat on the other side of the table.
“Do you want revenge?” he asked.
“How she’d die?”
So much for no details, but Fenimore wasn’t about to lie an answer to a direct question. “Slit her throat,” he said. “Right outside The Olympus.”
“Lots of blood been spilt in that square…”
“Since the feud.”
The Starman’s pain became the narrowed eyes and flared nostrils of madness. “Ain’t all been since! The days of Rafael Rodriguez wasn’t bloodless days.” After a pause, he added, calmer, “How’d you end up dressed in them greys anyway?”
Fenimore told The Starman.
When he was done telling, The Starman laughed, got up, and walked to the door separating the living room from the bedroom where Fenimore had had his sleep. “Ye still want my explanation for the horse outside?”
Fenimore nodded. The Starman quietly opened the door, and waved for Fenimore to look inside.
Asleep on the bed was:
The sack-headed man, the orphan whose life Fenimore had apparently saved when he’d shot the two Picassos and the Rhodes in the town square.
“Ain’t speaking clearly because he’s swollen and ain’t got much teeth or tongue, but I filled in the gaps, and goddamn kid escaped his own redemption, took a horse and rode out. He rode out past here until I seen him through my sky glass just like I seen you, but he was near dead and he fell off, and I went out to get him, brought him here, gave him some of my legume soup and now he’s gone dreaming and snoring.”
The sack-headed man looked barely human to Fenimore. His skin was various shades of black, purple and green, and his clothes folded over the chair next to the bed were bloodied, pussed and vomited.
“Tough kid,” The Starman said. He closed the door, letting the sack-headed man sleep. “Probably been toiling the mines since he was twelve, maybe younger.”
The Starman poured both of them a bowl of soup and they sat down again.
“Tell me about the mines,” Fenimore said.
“They’re bad cocksuckers.”
“What do they mine?”
The soup tasted more acrid than Fenimore remembered, but he ate anyway.
“Coal and iron, mostly, but there’s another mineral down there, a metal, it don’t have no name, but it sure has its uses.” He switched tack and tone. “The poncho I undersewed for you, the one you were wearing that belonged to the man you shot dead, you remember?”
“Yeah.”
“The rings I sewed underneath, hard as whores, stop blades and bullets—that’s what else they mine. Or they could mine. Don’t know if they do. Could be too goddamn stupid.”
“So how do you know about it?”
The Starman shoveled a generous helping of soup into his mouth, to delay answering Fenimore felt. “I and mine used to toil down there, too,” he said between swallowing. “Real bad cocksucker, dark days, and I wasn’t even the hard labour.”
“Was it Iron Rhodes who started the mine?”
The slight change of topic seemed to The Starman’s liking. “Hoo hoo hoo! You truly don’t know much. Ain’t nobody but Rafael Rodriguez who started it. Built the whole goddamn town on the profits, him and the widow. Brought in the Rhodeses to organise and run it and the Picassos to make sure what they pulled out of the ground they could take out and sell without it being robbed, and same with the money coming in. The Rhodeses is smart that way, like government, and there’s a lot of Picassos and they got guns and agreements and truces with all the gangs and no-gooders around.”
“The Widow Rodriguez said the Rhodes and Picassos banded together to kill her husband.”
“That’s the short truth of it, but Rafael Rodriguez invited them in first. He just kept ‘em weak enough to keep under his control, but they were only weak when they were alone. When they were together they got strong, and together they decided since they were doing all the work anyway, they could keep doing it without Rafael Rodriguez telling ‘em to do it, so they killed him.”
Fenimore finished his soup. “And the residents of Hope Springs kept working the mines.”
“That’s right. You been in town, so you tell me whether you seen an adult man in the daytime who ain’t neither a Rhodes nor Picasso.”
It was a rhetorical question. The Starman took advantage of the pause to take both empty bowls, stack them on an empty shelf and pour two cups of coffee. A third cup—meant perhaps for Winnie—remained empty. He delivered the filled cups to the table. Fenimore took a drink, and they resumed their conversation.
“Why do they work?” Fenimore asked.
The sack-headed man moaned from the bedroom. Bad dreams or too vivid memories.
“Because Iron Rhodes’ law took away their guns and burgled their will. You seen what they do to the ones don’t work hard enough, goddamn. If you don’t do your burden, they make an example of you, which sometimes ain’t enough, so then they make an example of yours, by which I mean women and children, which is enough, because…”
“Because everyone obeys the law.”
“Like it’s God given.”
“Except the Picassos.”
“That’s right, but the Picassos ain’t able to manage themselves, and they ain’t so stupid they don’t know they ain’t able to manage a town or mine, so they let the Rhodes do that, even though they hate ‘em, and they take their half cut by controlling the flow of the minerals and the money. Without the Rhodes, there ain’t nothing to flow, and without the Picassos, there ain’t no way of flowing. Hence why Hope Springs has got itself a feud, and why it ain’t ever gonna goddamn end.”
“Unless you put the guns back in the hands of the mine workers.”
“Then you got yourself a bloodbath.”
“But for all the blood that’s already been spilled, what’s the spilling of a little more in the name of a good cause?”
“If the only blood you spill be bad…”
“I’m not talking horse’s blood, Starman. There ain’t a drop of human blood in Hope Springs that’s still good.”
The Starman said nothing.
“You disagree?”
“All I’m thinking is that sometimes what a man does or doesn’t do because he’s afraid doesn’t necessarily affect on the morality of the blood in his veins,” The Starman said. “And I think many a resident in Hope Springs be afraid.”
“But the Rhodes and the Picassos—they deserve to die?”
“At each other’s throats.”
The Starman got up and added logs to the fire, which was burning low. “Why do you want to help a no-place like Hope Springs solve its feudin’ problem?”
“Because, once, there was a town just like Hope Springs,” Fenimore started to say, but it wasn’t true and he said instead: “Because there’s money in it, and I need money to do what I need to do.” He felt the weight of the coins again.
“Do you suppose it don’t matter one way nor another why you do good if you do good?”
“Suppose I plan to do bad.”
Again, The Starman said nothing.
“Starman, tell me, who was Katie O’Rourke?”
“She was my wife,” The Starman said—before dropping the log he was holding, and falling to his knees on the floor. He put his hands on his face and, for a second, looked ready to lean forward into the fire, to self-immolate, but Fenimore grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him away.
The Starman, sobbing, told the following story:
He was young and an engineer when he came to Hope Springs looking for work and hoping to make a life for himself. This was during the Rodriguez days, but after the Rhodes and the Picassos had been invited. And he did find work. He found it in the mine, as an engineer, developing the shafts and the trolleys and the pickaxes, creating the dynamite, and otherwise improving the efficiency of the operation. In the evenings, he tinkered with gadgets and inventions. Although the pay wasn’t great, they were the good days.
One day, an Irishwoman arrived in town, and with her came her daughter, Katie O’Rourke, young, red-haired and beautiful. At first, the pair of them was just passing through on their way to elsewhere, but the Irishwoman was sickly and she caught ill, and Katie O’Rourke took a temporary job at the notary’s office to make enough money to pay for lodgings and medicine. It was in that office that The Starman—or Harvey, as he was called then—met Katie O’Rourke.
She also met Iron Rhodes and every other man in Hope Springs, because all except the Picassos, who married only their own, came around to see her and speak to her, and flirt, each secretly hoping to convince her to stay and become his wife. Simply laying eyes on her, it was said, could put a smile on a man’s face for the rest of his week. Productivity increased.
Katie O’Rourke accepted these interests, but always with the caveat that she was in Hope Springs only temporarily, until her mother’s health improved enough for them to travel again, at which point she would give notice, pack up her things and leave. Still, the suitors came.
However, the Irishwoman’s health did not improve. It worsened, and, on a particularly drab and rainy September day, she died. Rafael Rodriguez held a funeral that the entire town attended, the women to pay their respects, secretly hoping to see Katie O’Rourke announce her intention to leave, and the men to hear the opposite. When the funeral was over, Katie O’Rourke didn’t say a word, but starting on the day she returned to work, and the suitors came by as before, she no longer attached a caveat to her acceptance of their flirtations.
Of the men who caught her eye, two in particular also caught her heart: Iron Rhodes, because he was outgoing and confident, and Harvey, because he was smart and sweet and shy. Before long, it was common knowledge in Hope Springs that one of them would become her husband.
After the winter, she made her choice.
The wedding was held in the spring and was as well attended as the funeral had been. The whole town rejoiced—with the exception of Iron Rhodes, who, feeling bested by a man with no particular qualities, started mistreating Harvey from that day forward.
But Harvey and Katie O’Rourke’s marriage was good, and life was good, and they moved in together in a little house and nine months later they welcomed a son into the world. They named him Aiden, after the saint, and doted on him so endlessly that the boy grew up spoiled and entitled, and played cruel tricks on people from a young age.
When he was eight years old, one of these tricks ended in the death of a merchant who’d arrived in Hope Springs to sell his goods, but who’d left in a hearse wagon with a black cloth covering what remained of his face after a firework had gone off in his face. Aiden was apprehended and made to face trial. He was found guilty of manslaughter by Iron Rhodes, who had proclaimed himself the town’s Justice the previous year. The punishment for manslaughter for any resident of Hope Springs under the age of sixteen was a lifetime sentence in the mines.
However, upon the impassioned pleadings of Katie O’Rourke, who visited Iron Rhodes daily to beg for mercy (and, some said, other things), it was agreed that Aiden would be offered a redemption. In what was a particularly cruel twist of fate, the redemption was scheduled for the same day as had been Harvey’s marriage to Katie O’Rourke.
The day came, young and scared Aiden was placed on the platform in the town square, and Iron Rhodes himself announced the offer of redemption.
Harvey and Katie O’Rourke were amongst the crowd, and the moment the offer was given Katie O’Rourke pushed Harvey forward and implored him to take punishment upon himself so that their son would be spared. Harvey was not a brave man, but he agreed to suffer his son’s punishment.
This was not enough for Iron Rhodes, however, who had hated Harvey for eight years, and now, given the opportunity to see his enemy suffer, called out that to save his son, Harvey would have to suffer sexual indecencies performed on him in public for a full cycle of day and night.
Because the redemptions were not as frequent then as they are now, the crowd, hungry for such a spectacle, approved Iron Rhodes’ idea. Democracy, Iron Rhodes said, had spoken. So, while the crowd waited, Harvey was asked if he agreed to endure these public sexual indecencies to spare his son from the mine sentence.
To this, Harvey could not consent—not for his son, who watched with terror from the platform, and not for Katie O’Rourke, who was his wife and whom he loved with all his heart, and who pleaded with him to say, “Yes.”
To Harvey’s silence, Iron Rhodes said that mercy had been offered and rejected, and he approved the original punishment.
Aiden was sent to the mines.
That night, Katie O’Rourke made one final trip to plead for mercy with Iron Rhodes. She never returned to the home she had shared with Harvey. Under the stars, the Notary granted her an expedited divorce, authorized by Iron Rhodes, and issued a second marriage certificate. Katie O’Rourke, who’d come to Hope Springs not intending to stay, had chosen to wed the man who had condemned her son to the mines in the name of the justice rather than continue living with the one who had failed to save him on account of his own pride and fear.
Aiden died from exhaustion in December of the following year.
His mother followed him to the grave, suffering from grief and other health troubles, perhaps inherited from her own mother and perhaps exaggerated by the stress she was under, and Iron Rhodes outlawed any woman to wear her hair red.
Upon Katie O’Rourke’s death, Harvey packed his things, gave notice, and left his job in Hope Springs to settle in a cabin in the desert, where he hoped to work himself to death trying to survive in the wild with no help from anyone and no companionship.
But he was tougher than he’d imagined, and he did survive, and, in fact, was still surviving—
“I murdered ‘em both,” The Starman said. “I murdered ‘em with my own goddamn cowardice.”
He’d run out of tears. His eyes were raw.
Fenimore grabbed him under the armpits and helped him sit at one of the tables.
“My blood’s rotten…”
Fenimore scooped more legume soup into The Starman’s bowl and told him to eat, saying, “If your blood was rotten, I’d be a dead man.”
As The Starman whined and ate, Fenimore looked through the maps that had been laid out on the table. They showed the surrounding area, but for what purpose Fenimore didn’t know. He grabbed one and walked into the bedroom, where the sack-headed man was sleeping.
Fenimore shook him awake.
The Starman stood in the doorway, watching them through his salty eyes.
Sack-head opened his puffy eyes and puffy lips.
“I want you to nod,” Fenimore said, “to answer this: do you want the men who did this to you to die?”
Sack-head didn’t hesitate. He nodded.
“Now I want you to point.” Fenimore spread the map on the floor. “Show me where the mine is.”
Sack-head rolled onto his stomach so that his arm was hanging off the bed and pointed to a spot a couple of miles northeast of Hope Springs. He also made sounds that wanted to be words, which Fenimore didn’t understand.
But The Starman did. “He says he knows your face.”
“No,” Fenimore said to Sack-head, “you haven’t seen me before.”
He was about to roll up the map, when another series of sounds, painful, desperate ones, made him stop. He could have sworn he had heard the word “delivery”.
The Starman translated. “He says that though there be only one way in and out of the mine, there be also a secret place for deliveries.”
Sack-head pointed to a point on the map a small ways away from where he’d pointed before, held his hands together in a circle, and said, “Hole.”
“There’s a hole there to make deliveries to the mine?”
Sack-head nodded. “Red… rock.”
“It’s by a red rock. How big is the hole?”
Sack-head held his hands together again. The shape he made wasn’t big enough to get anyone out, but it was big enough to pass guns through, as long as you did it one gun at a time.
“Family,” Sack-head said.
“Families deliver things to the men in the mine through that hole?”
Sack-head nodded.
“Do the Rhodes know about it?”
Sack-head shook his head.
“Thank you,” Fenimore said.
But Sack-head shook his head even more fervently, then pointed to himself, then to Fenimore.
The Starman said, “I think he’s say—”
“I know what he’s saying.”
Fenimore rolled up the map and walked away. As he was stepping from the bedroom to the living room, he heard one last painfully deformed word: “Kill.” He imagined the swollen lips saying it. He remembered the Rhodes speaker’s gun breaking through the teeth between them. Yeah, he thought, people will get killed.
In the living room, The Starman asked, “I wager the plan is to put weapons in them miners’ hands, but where will you get the weapons?”
“The plan is to make money.”
Regardless, Fenimore didn’t know where he’d get the guns. If he found the Widow Rodriguez’ fabled list, he might use that. Then again, ordering guns would take time. The simpler option would be to take the guns that were already in Hope Springs—and there were plenty in the hands of the Rhodes and Picassos—and redistribute them, but he hadn’t any idea about how to do that.
“So what’s the next step you be taking?”
Fenimore crossed the living room and walked outside. He picked up the rock that was weighing down his shirt and coat, and put both on.
“The next step is to follow my orders.”
The Starman shuddered. “Which orders those be?”
“I’m being paid two hundred dollars to find and kill Pablito Picasso,” Fenimore said. “The next step is to kill that child.”
The Starman gritted his teeth. “If I be remembering right, you also be standing to gain two hundred for locating the orphan boy escaped his redemption, and you done so by locating him here.”
“The orphan boy’s worth more than two hundred dollars to me. The child’s not worth anything alive.”
“And that be the only difference?”
“Yeah,” Fenimore said, “that be,” and he went around back and untied his horse.
As soon he was without range of The Starman’s cabin, Fenimore turned in the direction of the mine. He wanted to see it for himself. The night was getting deep, which meant working hours were coming. Before morning, the Rhodes would surely lead the men of Hope Springs to the mine entrance, and Fenimore wanted to be there to see exactly how that happened.
The land transformed itself gradually from desert flat to hills covered by dry grass, shrubs and cactuses.
In the distance, mountains faded into view.
The ground became rocky.
Fenimore’s pace slowed, but he still came upon the mine—which was a solitary wooden construction at the base of a weird and stony mound—in plenty of time.
One of the advantages of the new landscape was that it was possible to hide. Fenimore took advantage by tying his horse to a tree behind a bluff, and positioning himself between two others from which he had a good view of the mine entrance. In the nighttime, it looked foreboding but inconspicuous. It was a mine entrance. There were many like it in the world.
He settled into a more comfortable position.
He dozed.
When he regained his senses, the atmosphere was lighter and two Rhodes on horseback were making their way toward the mine entrance. Behind them, like a mass of drying mud propelled by nothing more than gravity, hundreds of men plodded forward, flanked every once in a while by more Rhodes riders holding big Rhodes rifles. The escort looked minimal, and Fenimore wondered whether the men were so beaten that they obeyed so easily, or whether the Rhodes were cutting corners on account of the commotion in town.
When the miners neared, the two front riders dismounted and opened the entrance. It looked rickety, but behind it was another entrance, this one made of metal, that didn’t look rickety at all.
Unlike most other things Rhodes, this entrance was locked with a standard key lock.
One of the riders pawed around in the inside of his coat until he produced the key. He unlocked the entrance, then he and the second rider pulled it open and the miners restarted their solemn march, single file this time, into the mine.
After the last of them had disappeared, the riders who’d been flanking the column disappeared after them.
Once those Rhodes were in, the front riders pushed close the entrance, applied the lock, and sat down. One of them pulled out two cigars and they went about smoking without saying anything to each other.
Fenimore retreated to where he’d tied his horse.
Two outside guards wasn’t a lot, he reasoned. The guards inside—Fenimore had counted eight of those—were the bigger problem, but also an opportunity. The Starman had asked how Fenimore would ever find the guns to arm the miners with. Part of the answer was now obvious: the Rhodes would carry them in themselves.
Considering that some sort of tactical progress, Fenimore skirted around the bluff until he couldn’t see the mine entrance or smoking guards and put his mind to locating the delivery hole Sack-head had told him about. There were a few red rocks and he overturned them all. Only one covered a hole. The hole was as small as Sack-head had illustrated, but where it went, and how big was the place it went to, Fenimore didn’t know.
He replaced the red rock.
He retraced his steps to his horse, got on and made toward Hope Springs.
However, rather than ride down the street that divided the Picasso side of town from the Rhodes side of town, Fenimore kept to the town’s outskirts until he was in Picasso territory. He then made straight, making sure his grey coat was as visible as possible. It was a risk, but he was counting on his eyesight being better than theirs.
When he saw the first Picassos appear from between their adobes, Fenimore stopped, dismounted and laid himself face down on the desert ground with his hands behind his head.
When the Picassos were standing over him, talking amongst themselves in Spanish, he said, “My name is Fenimore. I’m the one Ezekiel Rhodes is looking for. I’m unarmed. I’m turning myself in. I bring information you may find useful.”
They jerked him to his knees, patted him down, upon finding no weapons on his person discussed something more in Spanish, then tied his hands together and marched him into town.
“Gringo,” one of them said, “maybe you’re not so stupid after all.”
The Picasso half of town was wider than the Rhodes half, or at least that was the impression made by all the flat roofs. It was also more populated, with women and children running in the streets and men with guns lingering in the morning shade between buildings. All of them eyed Fenimore with equal suspicion, and he could feel the proud, protruding chests of those who were leading him in. They were the lucky dogs who’d captured him, the most wanted one.
They hadn’t bound his wrists properly, though. If he’d wanted to get his hands loose, he could have done so in seconds. The Picassos may have had the manpower advantage over the Rhodes, but they were neither as careful nor well drilled.
Further on they went until, just as the Rhodes’ street ended on the Rhodes fortress, the Picasso street ended on an aging but still beautiful building with red roof tiles and ornate windows that Fenimore heard announced as la casa Picasso.
On closer inspection, some of its tiles were missing.
Dark arms protruded and swung languidly from the windows that no longer had panes.
The Picassos walked Fenimore up to the building’s front doors, making sure he was always cognizant of the revolvers and rifles trained on him from above, behind and all around, and helped him inside with a kick.
When he looked up he saw Lola.
Pablito Picasso passed behind her, speeding from one room to another.
The insides of the casa Picasso were how Fenimore imagined his own insides to be: good enough to function, but otherwise overcome by rawness and imperfection.
“We meet again,” Lola purred. “I do hope you enjoyed your bath.”
Fenimore got to his feet, untying his wrists in the process. The half dozen armed men lounging in chairs in the main room didn’t notice. They proceeded to stare at the high ceiling and fan themselves with their sombreros as if in preparation for the hot day to come. Fenimore didn’t guess when they’d last had a bath. Lola at least didn’t smell.
“I have information,” Fenimore said.
“Don’t we all.”
“I want to speak with Ezekiel Picasso.”
This caught the loungers’ attention. They stiffened at the saying of the name and switched the grips on their weapons.
“He’s out,” Lola said, “killing people, looking for you.”
“Someone should tell him to stop looking.”
“Someone should.”
Lola laughed, and Fenimore saw the psychotic in her eyes. She was no different than—
“He’s my brother,” Lola said, as if reading his mind. “But he’s not in charge. He’s just the enforcer if you will.” She was wearing the same dress as before and looked just as alluring in it. “If you want someone’s horse’s throat slit, you talk to Ezekiel. If you have information, you see my father, Ignacio.”
“Why is Ezekiel looking for me?”
The name made them stiffen every time.
“Word is you shot two of our men, stabbed a third to death with a fork, and ran to the Rhodes for protection.”
“Funny, then, me being here.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“Take me to see your father.”
“He’s asleep.”
“Wake him.”
“He’s ill.”
“Maybe my information will make him better.”
Lola laughed again. “Nothing will make him better. He’s ill and he’s going to die.”
“Maybe you should put him out of his misery.”
Fenimore knew he should bite his tongue because the Picassos were about as predictable as a den of vipers, but there was something about Lola that he hated. It was the way she made him feel, like he wanted to wring her neck and tear off her dress at the same time.
“We are Catholics. You wouldn’t understand. To us, life is precious, and who are we to take it away? Suffering is but the road we take to Heaven.”
As they were staring at each other, poison accumulating between them, a servant ran up and whispered something into Lola’s ear.
“It seems you are in luck,” she said once the servant was gone. “My father has awoken.”
She led Fenimore across the room, beside the loungers, down corridors to a quiet place at the far end of the casa. There, a skeleton of a man lay in a massive bed, protected from the world by layers of transparent mesh and surrounded by four woman fanning him with large natural fans in steady, perfect unison. The women sat at the four corners of the bed.
“Leave us,” Lola told them.
Without hesitation they stopped fanning and left. The air in the room became immediately stale.
Lola leaned toward the skeletal man. “Papa.”
Ignacio Picasso’s eyes were open but seemed to be looking through the world rather than at it, and he didn’t react. Somewhere inside, a part of Fenimore that he didn’t want to know existed felt pity for this father and daughter.
“Papa,” she repeated, “it’s Lola.”
“Lola.”
She put her hand under each layer of mesh and closed it on his brittle hand.
“Ah, Lola,” he said. “Tell me, have we tortured the stranger yet?”
Fenimore’s pity ended.
“No, papa. The stranger is here in the room with us. He’s come to speak with you.”
“Lovely, Lola. Later we will torture him…”
Fenimore cleared his throat.
Ignacio Picasso squeezed Lola’s hand and used whatever muscles he had left to sit up in bed. In his time, he must have been an impressive and intimidating man, but time spares no one. “You are the stranger,” he said. “Tell me why you have come.”
“I have been sent by Iron Rhodes.”
Fenimore heard a gun being cocked. It made him uncomfortable that he didn’t know from where. Ignacio Picasso’s jaws started to clatter. His teeth knocked into each other.
Lola squeezed his hand. “Papa, relax.”
“I have been sent,” Fenimore said as calmly as possible, “on a mission to kill a boy named Pablito Picasso.”
Ignacio Picasso’s jaws clattered even more uncontrollably. If they did it for long, Fenimore thought, his skull might crack open and his brains come pouring out like an egg yolk. “Mi hijo…”
Fenimore went on, “I have been promised two hundred dollars if I carry this mission out.”
“We should kill you,” Lola spat.
“And Iron Rhodes would send another in my place, and this one wouldn’t come by your door. He’d come at night, through a missing window, and in the morning you’d find a cold body where hours earlier there’d been a sleeping boy.”
“Why do you tell us this?”
“Because,” Fenimore said, “my allegiance is to the highest bidder. If Iron Rhodes pays me two hundred dollars to kill, you can pay me three hundred to let live.”
“Or two hundred and one.”
“Profit’s profit.”
“How do we know you’re not lying?” Lola asked.
“You don’t.” Fenimore slowly raised his hands. “But if you reach into the front pocket of my coat, you’ll find a piece of paper. If you read that piece of paper, it will confirm everything I’ve said. Of course, you could always just believe me.”
Lola reached into Fenimore’s pocket and pulled out the paper that Iron Rhodes had given him. She read it in anger before passing it to Ignacio Picasso.
“The stranger speaks the truth.”
“What else are the Rhodes paying you to do?”
“A flat one thousand dollars to be on their side of the street when the final gundown begins.”
Ignacio Picasso’s jaws had gone quiet. “Are you worth that much, stranger?”
“Iron Rhodes doesn’t know I’m here.”
“What difference—”
Ignacio Picasso raised his hand. Ill, he was still a cunning son of a bitch. “Our man within the enemy ranks.”
“Two thousand,” Lola said.
“One thousand and one,” Fenimore said.
“Four thousand dollars, plus another six thousand from the Rhodes vaults, once we acquire them,” Ignacio Picasso said. “If one wants loyalty, one must pay for it.”
Fenimore smiled, mindful that this shell of an old man had minutes earlier wanted to torture him. Nevertheless, the smile was genuine. The mention of a Rhodes vault had made his day.
“Vault?” he asked.
“Every bastard keeps his riches somewhere.”
“The difference,” Lola said, “is that in the case of Iron Rhodes we know exactly where.”
“There is a reason Iron Rhodes wants Pablito gone.”
“Little fingers fit into tight spaces.”
“But the boy,” Fenimore said, “must vanish, or the Rhodes will lose their trust in me. He must appear dead.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll hold a funeral,” Lola said. “I’ll beat my chest and cry.”
Fenimore wanted to ask about the vault, but knew he shouldn’t press his luck. The Picassos were already biting. Things were going well. Patience, that’s what Master Taki had taught—patience in cracking safes, and all other endeavours, because everything breaks, eventually.
Lola pushed out her hip. “But, papa, tell me why our newly purchased stranger won’t simply walk down the street to the other side of town and tell Iron Rhodes all about our little meeting.”
“Because if he admits disloyalty, he dies.”
“And why isn’t it in our interest to make him dead, too? He’s already warned us.”
Ignacio Picasso looked at Fenimore. “Information, Lola. Nothing is more valuable. To possess information is to possess the future, and now we possess a source of information.” He coughed up something green and sticky. “All our stranger has to do to earn his money is listen. Once he listens, he tells. Once we know, the Rhodes cannot surprise us.”
He coughed again, and lay himself down. “But now I am tired. Leave me, my sweet daughter, and let me rest.”
Lola gave him a kiss on his cheek through the mesh.
“Before he leaves, treat our stranger to some entertainment and show him our floor plans.”
Having finished the sentence, Ignacio Picasso went back to looking through the world.
When Lola and Fenimore were outside the room, she snapped her fingers and the four fanning women shuffled back in.
“Floor plans or entertainment?” she asked.
“Floor plans.”
She led him up winding stairs.
“You’re hard working for a double crosser.”
They arrived at a study that looked as if a pack of rabid javelinas had just gone through it. Books, pages and graphs were scattered about, some pinned to the walls, others marked up with pencils and paints. There wasn’t a system to the mess as far as Fenimore could tell, but somehow Lola knew where to go and through which pile to dig to pull out the floor plans she wanted. She spread one of them on top of a stack of old portraits.
The floor plan was hand drawn, titled “Ground” and Fenimore recognized the building at once: the Rhodes fortress.
He saw the main doorway, the two branching halls, the door to Iron Rhodes’ steel study and the stairs leading to the upper level. The scale was off and lines crooked, but the floor plan looked otherwise accurate.
He pointed to the hall leading to the dungeons. “That’s where they first took me.”
Lola put a second floor plan over the first. This one said “Lower”. Seen as a drawing, it was a pretty geometric pattern of pathways and small rooms, but when Fenimore remembered the dampness and peeling wallpaper, it wasn’t pretty anymore, and he wondered what possible uses such a layout had served, or if it had been dungeons since the beginning.
He counted rooms. “That one.”
“That one’s not interesting,” Lola said. “But this one.”
Her finger pointed at yet another square. Fenimore remembered enough of the “Ground” plan to know that “this one” was directly under Iron Rhodes’ study. “Voices carry, conversations can be overheard,” she said.
“How did you draw these plans?”
“Little fingers.”
Fenimore noted the location of the spying room. He also remembered the rectangular window in the room he’d been kept in—too small for anyone but a child to crawl through…
Lola slid the “Lower” floor plan away.
On the “Ground” plan, she pointed to Iron Rhodes’ study.
“Where I met with Iron Rhodes,” Fenimore said.
After which Lola pointed to the hall leading right from the main doorway.
Fenimore hadn’t been down that hall.
“Kitchen,” she said, “and vault.”
Fenimore had the feeling she was testing him, trying to see if he’d actually been inside the Rhodes fortress like he said he’d been. He treated her description as a question. “I don’t know. They didn’t take me there.”
Lola laughed.
“I’m saying, stranger, that that’s where the vault was. They wouldn’t have taken you to see it. But these floor plans are three years old, and vaults can change position, so you can understand how valuable the information would be if you could confirm or deny their accuracy.”
“And the upper floor?” Fenimore put his finger on the stairs.
“Unknown.”
In one motion, Lola swept the floor plans off the stack of portraits, revealing one of Simon Bolivar, and looped her arms around Fenimore’s shoulders.
She kissed him.
Bolivar watched without blinking.
Fenimore kept his tongue firmly inside his own mouth, aware of the increasing pressure around his neck and harbouring no doubts about the intended effect of what Lola was doing. A man’s loyalty could be bought by more than money, but at least the Widow Rodriguez was a serviceable actress.
He pushed her away.
Lola’s latent psychosis flickered.
“Do you always try to seduce men employed by your enemy?” he asked.
“But you belong to us.”
“So why buy something you already own?”
She fixed her hair and stretched the curved shoulders peeking out of her dress. “You should be getting back, or Iron Rhodes may begin to feel suspicious.”
“And Pablito?”
“We’ll hold the funeral on Sunday.”
So much for entertainment. Fenimore descended the stairs to the main floor. Lola walked behind him. He knew she wouldn’t stick his back with a knife, but he still would have preferred their positions to have been reversed. The only thing he felt comfortable feeling against his back was a wall, and even then only when nobody was shooting.
On the main floor, Fenimore suggested Lola let him leave through a back door, in case Iron Rhodes had spies of his own. Really, he wanted to see more of the casa Picasso. If every bastard kept his riches somewhere, he wanted to know where Ignacio Picasso kept his.
All he saw were bare rooms and lounging gunfighters.
“Stay safe,” Lola said when Fenimore was already outside. “If you see Ezekiel, keep your head down. He still considers you the enemy.”
“What do you consider me?”
“Eyes and ears.”
Fenimore brushed off his coat and walked into the desert. The air around him shimmered with heat.
He regretted losing the horse he’d escaped the Sugarcane on and wondered what the Picassos had done with it. It was a good horse, fast. But he still had the one tied up in front of The Olympus.
Keeping Hope Springs in the shimmering distance, he circled it until he saw the purple sign, then turned in and made the slow, steady walk down its neutral street. He wanted people to see him. Some of them did, staring pale faced out of windows or doors that had been kicked down. Many others didn’t—because they were lying dead in the street.
The grave-maker was loading the latter onto his hearse wagon, above which buzzed a cloud of flies, scattered occasionally by the whipped tails and muscle spasms of the wagon’s three powerful horses.
“Good day, Mr Rhodes,” the grave-maker said when Fenimore walked past.
He wasn’t being polite. He was being honest.
Fenimore bowed his head.
At the town square, Fenimore took a left and made for the Sugarcane.
Its interior wasn’t as joyfully anarchic as before. The piano player played a sombre tune. The only men sitting at the tables were wearing grey. “Morning, Mr Rhodes,” they said.
“Good morning, Messrs. Rhodes.”
There was a faint blood stain on the floor. It shone with the failed effort of having tried to scrub it clean.
The buxom barmaid Olivia stood behind the bar.
“Mr Rhodes,” she said.
“I left a rifle here last night. I’d like to have it back.”
The Rhodes watched him from behind their cards, which they didn’t seem to be counting, and their mugs, from which they didn’t seem to be drinking. Fenimore had a feeling they weren’t here as clientele.
Olivia glanced above Fenimore’s shoulder.
“Do as he says.”
The voice wasn’t Olivia’s, but it was unmistakable. Fenimore glanced over his shoulder, too. The Widow Rodriguez was perched atop the stairs.
Olivia handed Fenimore the hootin’ gun.
“Come up, please,” the Widow Rodriguez said.
A few Rhodes got up from their seats.
“It’s fine,” she commanded them. “Keep watching the doors.”
They sat back down.
Fenimore walked up the stairs and together with the Widow Rodriguez entered the room with the exploded pillow, which had been replaced, and the bullet hole in the floor, which was still there. A warm breeze blew through where the glass in the window used to be. The shards had been cleaned away.
The Widow Rodriguez sat on the bed, as she’d done the previous night. “Two of my girls are dead,” she said, “because Ezekiel Picasso was looking for you.”
Fenimore moved to take off his coat.
“Leave it on.”
Her eyes bore into his. He asked, “What about the other dead—is that Ezekiel Picasso, too?”
“It’s dangerous to know you, Mr Rhodes.”
“How many?”
“Ask the gravemaker to divide by five dollars. He gets paid by the corpse.” She did the trick with pulling up her dress. Fenimore didn’t see the point, but maybe it was second nature to her by now. “Grieving aside, I’m more interested in why Ezekiel Picasso was going door to door, spilling blood trying to get residents to point their fingers at you.”
“I killed his brother.”
“Juan?”
“Pablito.”
Her eyelashes perked up. “The boy?”
“Who’s Juan?”
“One of the three dead Picassos from the shooting in the square. Why did you kill the boy?”
“Orders.” He wiped a few lingering spots of dust off his coat.
“That little gnat certainly had it coming, but I don’t understand the timing. Why now? He’s been a gnat since the day he came out of his mother’s womb.”
“Ask Iron Rhodes. You seem on good terms. His men guarding your establishment…”
“It’s a temporary arrangement, strictly business. I can’t risk a repeat of last night, and I couldn’t strike a deal with the Picassos, now could I?”
“Why’d you call me up here?”
“To warn you that Iron Rhodes may be using you as a sponge. You soak up the attention, he seizes the moment. And now, with Pablito dead, you’ll have Ezekiel and his sister, Lola, to deal with. A mother’s revenge.”
The twisted family picture was complete.
“How kind of you.”
“Strictly business, Mr Rhodes. I want you to live up to your end of our bargain.”
Another warm breeze blew in. This one carried the smell of gunpowder and moral decay.
“It also makes one wonder,” the Widow Rodriguez said, “a man murdering innocents to find another man, and this other man strolling into town the very next day…”
“What’s it make you wonder about?”
“Loyalties.”
Fenimore wiped a drop of sweat from his brow. “You should get that window fixed, or someone might mistake you for a Picasso.”
“My point exactly, Mr Rhodes.”
Despite his betrayal, Fenimore still felt safer in the Rhodes side of town, with the statue of Rafael Rodriguez behind him and the notary’s office to his left. Ostensibly, the Picassos were his allies. They wanted him alive so that he could report on the Rhodes. That, however, conflicted with Fenimore’s belief that one should never rely on the rationality of psychopaths.
That particular conundrum aside, things were starting to come into focus, and focus was comforting—like when you get socked in the head and your eyesight goes fuzzy, and then you get it back again, sharp, just in time to avoid the next blow and deliver a counter-punch of your own.
First on the agenda was getting Iron Rhodes to pay out $200 for the death of Pablito Picasso. Second was paying a visit to the spying room in the dungeons of the Rhodes fortress. If he could, Fenimore also wanted to confirm the existence and location of the Rhodes vault. In the vault would be money. With that money, he could begin plotting his vengeance against the six men who’d wronged him and the one whose name he refused to remember. Clank-clank went the coins.
But that was down the line.
Fenimore stepped into the notary’s office. “I need paper and a pen.”
“Your name?”
“Fenimore. Solicitor and member of the Hope Springs bar.”
The notary noted Fenimore’s grey clothes, but didn’t appear convinced. “Excuse me,” he said, and pulled out the scroll on which Iron Rhodes had written Fenimore’s name. The notary read the name several times, and once more aloud, as if by doing so he could make it disappear.
“Newly called,” he said.
“Two sheets of paper and one pen.”
The notary handed Fenimore both, then hung around, trying to see what Fenimore would write.
Fenimore didn’t. “I’ll return the pen later.”
“Of course, Mr Fenimore.”
“Mr Rhodes,” Fenimore corrected him.
The notary opened his mouth to protest, holding up the scroll, because, see, on the scroll it said—but decided against it. “Of course, Mr Rhodes. Return it whenever you finish.”
Back in the rising heat, Fenimore stuffed the pen and paper inside his coat.
At the gates in the concrete wall surrounding the Rhodes fortress, he said, “Antoninus Pius,” and the gates rolled open. Today, several guards were on wall patrol.
He passed Goggles, who was manning the gate mechanism, and knocked on the front door of the house: three light taps followed by a hard one.
Click.
He opened the door.
“Good morning, Mr. Rhodes.”
“Good morning, Messrs. Rhodes. I would like to speak with Justice Rhodes.”
The men in the bespoke suits were sitting on their red velvet-cushioned bench, drinking brandy and smoking pipes. One of them answered in place of the guards. “He is indisposed at the moment.”
The other said, “May we be of assistance?”
“Who are you?”
“Of assistance, if you let us.”
Like an exclamation point, the door to Iron Rhodes’ steel study opened and a grey man holding his head down and fresh welts on his cheeks shuffled out. He had the demeanour of a beaten dog.
One of the men in the bespoke suits took a sip of his brandy, waited until the grey man was gone, and extended his arm toward the open door. “The world turns. The Justice is no longer indisposed.”
Something banged within the study.
“If you dare, Mr Rhodes.”
Fenimore closed the heavy study door behind him. Standing behind his desk, facing the steel fireplace, Iron Rhodes pounded his fist against the wall.
“Justice Rhodes.”
The portrait of Katie O’Rourke jumped with each thump.
“If you have come to report failure,” Iron Rhodes said, “I advise you to leave.”
He pounded once more, before opening his giant hand and keeping it flush against the wall. His breath was heavy. His shoulders and back pumped in time with his lungs. A dozen seconds passed.
“Yet you remain.”
“Pablito Picasso is dead.”
Iron Rhodes turned, revealing a face as red as Katie O’Rourke’s hair and a dishevelled silver head of his own.
“When?”
“Last night.”
“How?”
“A hand over the mouth and a knife across the throat.”
The red on Iron Rhodes’ face became pink. “That explains the massacre. Ezekiel Rhodes is on the warpath.”
“What’s the body count?”
“Fourteen, mostly women and children.”
Fenimore counted. Seventy wasn’t a bad haul for the grave-maker. He said, “I’m still looking for the criminal who escaped the redemption.”
He wasn’t sure why he lied. Sack-head had already proved as useful as he would ever prove. He told himself it was to protect The Starman, but that required explanation, too. The Starman still had his timepiece—that was it: and Fenimore wanted it back.
“Forget about him,” Iron Rhodes said.
“And the reward?”
“Follow me.”
They exited the study and turned into the hall leading to where the kitchen and vault perhaps were.
A man was cooking something in a large pot.
Further, vertical bars barred the way. Iron Rhodes stopped, pulled a steel rod out of his pocket, and hit one of the bars with the rod.
“Wait here,” he said. “Antoninus Pius.”
The sound travelled up the bar.
The bars slid open.
Fenimore nearly choked.
The sound lock—this exact type of sound lock—had been invented by his father. He remembered testing the prototypes and sharing his father’s frustration when they didn’t work, and seeing his quiet jubilation when they did. As a boy, he must have hit such bars with matching rods a thousand times.
Iron Rhodes walked past where the bars had slid into the floor and vanished down the hall.
The bars slid closed.
The password, “Antoninus Pius,” was superfluous.
Although Fenimore knew that his father had sold the sound lock technology, he hadn’t realized he’d sold it to men like these, men like Iron Rhodes. Now, his gut felt like burning, like acid was corroding it from the inside. Technology is neither good nor bad, his father had taught him. It can only be used for both. But, because the future cannot be known, one cannot know the uses to which technology will be put. Therefore, his father had said, it is never bad to sell technology to the highest bidder. Such is the law of the market.
Iron Rhodes struck the bar with his rod.
The rod made its sound, the sound travelled up the bar, the bars slid open, Iron Rhodes stepped through, and the bars slid closed.
Iron Rhodes held a wad of cash. He counted off a few bills and handed them to Fenimore. “For you, Mr, Rhodes. Two hundred dollars for the killing of Pablito Picasso, more a two hundred dollar bonus for pursuit of the criminal.”
Fenimore stuffed the money into his coat, beside the sheets of paper and pen.
“Spend it wisely.”
“I intend to.”
“What else do you intend?”
“Anything you need.”
“I understand you to mean anything I shall pay for.”
“Is there a difference?”
Fenimore took the silent smile to mean there wasn’t. “Antoninus Pius,” he said when they were back in the study. “You should change that password.”
“I change it weekly. I enjoy reliving Roman history.”
“And if the Picassos overhear?”
“I also enjoy keeping a gatekeeper in my emploi, Mr Rhodes. He would not open my gates for a Picasso.”
“So the password is…”
“Misdirection.”
Iron Rhodes took a seat behind his desk. “Before you leave, I have one more question to pose to you.”
Fenimore had a question, too. He wanted to know what the remaining wad of money was for.
Iron Rhodes reached under his desk and pulled out the navy-white poncho that Fenimore had taken off Pedro and that The Starman had undersewn with what was apparently a kind of hard, rare metal. Iron Rhodes threw the poncho to Fenimore. Fenimore caught it and pretended to be seeing it for the first time.
“When you stabbed the Picasso man in the neck with your fork,” Iron Rhodes said, “one of his two companions was carrying this. I do not suppose you make anything of it.”
“I don’t.”
Iron Rhodes placed the wad of money on his desk. “Therefore, let this be your reward for finding out. Discover who made it, how he made it, and whether there are more or this is the only one.”
“What is it?”
“It is a poncho reinforced with armour.”
Fenimore touched the poncho, again feeling the metal rings that still seemed incapable of stopping a bullet, but that had also felt incapable of stopping a knife, yet had done that nicely.
“Keep your search secret.”
“Of course.”
Fenimore bowed.
In the main room, the men in bespoke suits had finished drinking their brandy and were talking with Goggles, who sat uncomfortably beside them. “He exits alive,” one of them said before turning to Goggles, whose legs were bouncing nervously on the floor. “So it appears to be your turn, Mr Rhodes.”
Goggles got up. The men in the bespoke suits watched him trudge toward the heavy door to Iron Rhodes’ study like a cow toward an abattoir, too stupid to know what it was doing but not liking it regardless. Fenimore made use of their lack of attention to go down the stairs leading to the dungeons.
He counted the cells as he passed them.
When he arrived at the door to the spying room, he spun the combination lock 12-1-5, and slipped inside. The cell was identical to the one he’d been kept in. He sat in the chair and listened. At first, he didn’t hear anything other than his own breathing, but as his ears adjusted to the hissing quiet, two voices became faintly audible. Lola had been right. The two voices were familiar. Iron Rhodes was talking to Goggles.
“…if they have one, it is reasonable to assume they have more, and if they have more, they negate our advantages,” Iron Rhodes was saying.
Goggles stammered when he spoke. “I’ve spoken—”
“Contractions, Mr Rhodes.”
“Sorry, Justice Rhodes.” Even his clearing of his throat was unsure. “I have spoken with Mr Rhodes in charge of the mine, and he assures me it is impossible for the Picassos to have gotten anything out, or in, so, perhaps, they have the Rhodesium from somewhere else.”
“That is equally impossible, as you know.”
“Yes, Justice Rhodes.”
“Therefore, explain this apparent impossibility to me.”
“I can’t…”
“You cannot.”
“Yes, Justice Rhodes.”
“Consequently, I have paid the stranger to investigate. Maybe he can make sense of what is impossible to you.”
“Yes, Justice Rhodes. But, Justice Rhodes, I do not trust…”
“Trust? I am paying him. He is bought. He has greed in his eyes, a man very much after myself. Clearly, I distrust him, but that is irrelevant. When he is no longer useful, he will be dealt with. Until then, he is our tool. We are in need of tools, Mr Rhodes. Despite the impossibility of our situation, it exists, and we must act accordingly.”
“Yes, Justice Rhodes.”
Fenimore fidgeted in his chair. The voices seemed clearer and louder.
“The Picassos have always maintained a manpower advantage over us. We have to date countered with better training and weaponry. In the first, I am starting to doubt.” Fenimore imagined Goggles’ cheeks reddening. “The second is approaching a critical point. As you know, Mr Rhodes, stockpiles are low.”
“Yes, Justice Rhodes. But, Justice Rhodes, the Picassos still need us to run the mines. That hasn’t changed.”
“Has not changed.”
“Yes.”
“I suspect it may be in the process of change. The widow is scheming.”
“But, Justice Rhodes, we are protecting…”
“Mutual self-interest, Mr Rhodes. I suspect the widow may be attempting to contact associates of her late husband. My contacts in Sliver City report certain rumblings and rumours. The Picassos may be too imbecilic to maintain a proper house, let alone a business, but there is enough profit to be made here to entice men of better breeding to help in such endeavours. If my suspicions are correct, that makes us both unnecessary and vulnerable.”
“A Picasso and Rodriguez alliance, with an army of Picassos in Rhodesium bullet proof ponchos…”
“Followed by a cadre of administrators from Sliver City.”
“It’s horrible!”
“It is, Mr Rhodes. Hence we must strike first.”
“But, Justice Rhodes, even if we do, and we win, the Picassos still control the countryside. They will still control the travel lanes. How will we ever move our material out of Hopes Springs or money into it? They will starve us out.”
It was a question to which Fenimore also wanted to know the answer. Although ever since the fall of Rafael Rodriguez the Picassos and the Rhodes were locked in a symbiotic relationship, it was the Rhodes who were more easily replaceable. Hope Springs may have been a rich Rhodes island, but it was surrounded by a Picasso sea, and though islands sometimes disappear, the sea was, is and always will be. There is no sun hot enough to reduce it to a layer of salt.
“We will not,” Iron Rhodes answered. “We will strike to enable a tactical retreat. When they are distracted, we will flee. That is why I need you, Mr Rhodes.”
“Flee from Hope Springs?”
“Are you a loyal solicitor, Mr Rhodes?”
“I am, Justice Rhodes.”
“Then, when the gunfight begins, you are to load everything onto as many wagons as necessary, telling no one, enlisting no men to help, and—”
There was knock on the door.
“Enter,” Iron Rhodes said.
Fenimore didn’t recognise the voice. It said, “Reporting from the Sugarcane brothel, Justice Rhodes.”
“Proceed.”
“No Picassos and no trouble, Justice Rhodes.”
“Any visitors at all?”
“Yes, Justice Rhodes. One of ours. The stranger.”
“What did he want?”
“He retrieved a rifle they had been holding for him, Justice Rhodes. Then the Widow Rodriguez met with him privately, upstairs.”
“For how long?”
“Not long, Justice Rhodes.”
“Thank you, Mr Rhodes. You are dismissed.”
There followed a few moments of silence, after which Iron Rhodes said, “What do you make of that?”
“I don’t know, Justice Rhodes.” It was Goggles again. “I said I don’t trust him, and I don’t.”
“Do not.”
“I don’t intend to, but, during the gunfight, Justice Rhodes, after I load everything onto the wagons, where do I go?”
“You wait for me.”
Fenimore heard heavy footsteps. “In the meantime, take this, and collect on as many debts as you can.”
“Yes, Justice Rhodes.”
“Be discrete.”
That was the end of the conversation.
And that was Iron Rhodes’ plan. Faced with a battle he thought he couldn’t win, he’d gather up his chips, punch someone in the face to cause a ruckus, and, under the cover of chaos, slip quietly out of the saloon to play cards another day, at another table, in another city. Given what Iron Rhodes knew and didn’t know, it was a rational play. Yet it was also an opportunity. Therefore, Fenimore had no incentive to tell Iron Rhodes that what he knew was wrong: that the Widow Rodriguez wasn’t scheming with the Picassos, but for herself, and that there was no Picasso army in bullet proof ponchos, but there was one that would charge blindly into Rhodes gunfire without it.
Fenimore rose from his chair. He took one sheet of paper and a pen out from his coat. He put the paper on the chair and wrote on it with the pen:
Leave this at the feet of the statue of Rafael Rodriguez. I am a friend. Expect help soon.
Sincerely,
Your fellow conspirator
Afterward, he walked to The Olympus, untied the horse that Iron Rhodes had given him, and rode out to where the ground was shrubs and the red rock covered the mine delivery hole. He lifted a rock that wasn’t red, wrapped the paper around it, uncovered the delivery hole and dropped the wrapped rock message inside.
It hit bottom with a crack.
The day was hot and there was no breeze. Fenimore’s clothes clung to his body.
His brain clung to the inside of his skull.
On his way back into Hope Springs, he passed within sight of the mine entrance, noted the same two guards sitting, smoking cigars, and imagined the men labouring inside, all of whom, in his imagination, had black and blood stained sacks on their heads, swinging pickaxes, sweating, thinking of their families, and Fenimore thought about his family, too: the seven coins in his pocket, his father, Master Taki. He wanted to believe that he was no different than they were, that what he was doing was for money, that he was seizing an opportunity, but with each swing of their sooty arms the men in the mine dug their imagined pickaxes deeper into Fenimore’s brain, and his brain hurt, and he felt a pain in his gut that he knew was called conscience.
Fenimore tied his horse outside The Olympus, went inside and up the stairs without looking at the hotel-keeper, saying only, “Draw me a hot bath,” and waited for the steaming pails of water to arrive. When they did, he filled the metal tub, which was still by the window, took off his clothes, and soaked himself until the water turned cold and the sun reached the middle part of the sky and began falling toward the horizon.
His conscience persisted.
The sun dipped, halved itself behind the rocky curve of the Earth, and disappeared. Before it appeared again, dragging with it another hopelessly hot day, Fenimore was already beyond Hope Springs, making his roundabout way to the casa Picasso. When the lookouts spotted him, he got face down on the ground. When they surrounded him, he said, ”My name is Fenimore and I need to see Ignacio Picasso,” and they said, “We know who you are,” and all of them walked the way to the Picasso street, where they turned left and walked on. This time, Fenimore made sure his horse walked with him.
After some banging and shouting, Lola met him in the main room. She was still rubbing the sleep out of her bloodshot eyes. The men in sombreros lounged, holding their guns. Some of their eyes were closed. Those men snored. Their chests rose and softly fell, dreaming of whatever it is that men with guns dream about.
“What do you want?”
Lola wasn’t as sultry as she’d been before. Her hair wasn’t as thick and her shoulders weren’t as rounded and juicy. She was still wearing her favourite style of dress, though. Maybe she slept in it. More likely, she’d passed out before having had the chance to get out of it.
“I need to see your father,” Fenimore said. “It’s urgent.”
“The last time wasn’t urgent, and you were here to kill Pablito. Maybe you have a mixed up sense of urgency.”
Fenimore smelled wine on her breath.
“Last time, I was here to tell you Iron Rhodes wanted Pablito dead.” She huffed, and Fenimore added, “But you’re right. The last time wasn’t urgent. This time is. Let that mean something.”
“Did you have time to see the vault?”
“It’s where you said.”
No women were fanning Ignacio Picasso, but the air was clean and he was awake when they entered. Lola sat beside him on the bed, kissed him on the cheek through the layers of his mesh, and squeezed his hand underneath. “Papa…”
He returned to reality.
“My sweet daughter.”
He saw Fenimore. “And you, stranger. Why do you wake me?”
“Iron Rhodes thinks you’re planning to run him and his men out of town, or, worse, put them in the ground.”
“Always,” Ignacio Picasso hissed.
Lola said, “But we need him to operate the mine and keep order in Hope Springs, with that law of his. We know that and he knows that. You’re wasting our time.”
“He thinks you’ve come to terms with the Widow Rodriguez to bring in outsiders to do both.”
Lola’s face suggested she’d never entertained that possibility.
“The devil you know,” said Ignacio Picasso—his face suggesting he entertained it daily, “is still a devil. I suspected this day would come.”
Lola squeezed her father’s hand, making his teeth rattle. “How do we know you’re not lying?”
“I didn’t lie about Pablito. I have no reason to lie now. We agreed you’d pay me for information. I’m bringing you information. Do you need to believe the butcher when he brings you a cut of meat?”
“I trust the butcher.”
“He can poison your meat.”
“One can also poison information,” Ignacio Picasso said, “but there are ways of tasting it to make sure it is pure. What does Iron Rhodes propose to do, now that he thinks we are planning to kill him?”
“An assault. He wants to strike before you do.”
Ignacio Picasso coughed.
“Let him try,” Lola said. “We’ve three times the men he has.”
“He also has armour, made of a mineral he’s discovered in the mines called Rhodesium. It stops bullets. He doesn’t have enough for all his men, but he has enough for some. Even some evens the odds.”
Ignacio Picasso’s teeth started to chatter without Lola’s squeezing his hand. Fenimore hoped that meant the bluff had worked. If the Picassos thought the Rhodes were cheating them, they might go a little mad.
“Cabron.”
Lola refused to blink her tired eyes.
“This is hard information to believe,” Ignacio Picasso said.
“So have someone taste it.”
“Stop speaking in riddles,” Lola said. “Propose what it is you came to propose.”
“On Sunday, you will hold Pablito’s funeral, which will prove to Iron Rhodes that I did what he paid me to do.” Fenimore watched their reactions. They were a pair of kettles coming to a boil with their steam whistles ripped off. “This will reinforce his trust in me. It will also give your men a reason for drinking and anger. After the funeral, one of them could stray into the Rhodes side of town, only a few steps past the town square, shouting about justice, vengeance and armour.”
“You want him shot?” Lola said.
“He wants him to be captured,” Ignacio Picasso said.
“I’ll take him in myself, and make sure he’s put in the cell where he can hear things. I can’t spend a lot time there without raising suspicions, and”—He smiled.—“you don’t believe what I say, but a prisoner, where else could he be, and why would one of your own lie?”
Ignacio Picasso nodded. Even Lola seemed taken with the idea.
“After a few days, I’ll have him released.”
“How will you do that, stranger? Or are you a magician, too?”
“I’ll convince Iron Rhodes that it’s a sign of good faith, a way to make you not suspect what he’s plotting.”
“Which is a final gundown.”
“The big gundown.”
“What happens if you can’t arrange his release?”
“Make sure he can write. If I can’t have him released, I’ll have him write what he’s overheard.”
“Or you’ll write it for him, and pretend,” Lola said.
“So tell him a key, some words in Spanish that nobody else knows. If you get a piece of paper with those words on it, you’ll know the information is real.”
Ignacio Picasso wiped the spittle that had gathered in the corner of his mouth and started running down his cheek. The possibility of power made him hungry. “Maybe you can run the town for us, stranger, being such a man of ideas.”
“I’m a man with a gun.”
“Against guns, there is armour. Tell me, has anyone found a mineral that protects against ideas?”
Fenimore wasn’t convinced Rhodesium protected against guns, either, but he didn’t argue. It was a useful concept, especially when both sides were afraid the other had it. Fear, much like the thought of being cheated, could bring out the madness in men, and madness could be exploited.
Lola was biting her lip. “Sunday is four days from now. If Iron Rhodes is as desperate as you say, he may act before then.”
“He’ll want to know that Pablito’s dead. Until he’s sure, he doesn’t know how much you know.”
“And then there are the unknown unknowns…”
Ignacio Picasso was losing his grip on reality again. Lola squeezed his hand, but he didn’t come back. His face turned the colour of old alabaster.
“Enough,” Lola said.
It certainly was.
Fenimore let himself out of the casa Picasso by the front door, supposedly under the watch of the lounging gunslingers. Really, they just snored, and he peeked into as many corners of the building as he could. Wherever he looked, there was dust, disorder and not much else. Fenimore knew keeping armed men meant paying them, and the Picassos kept a lot of armed men, even if they didn’t do much, so surely the Picassos also kept a treasure trove somewhere, a stash—they made a profit doing what they did: guaranteeing “protection” for Iron Rhodes’ imports and exports—into which they dipped their greasy fingers and for which they would fight. The question was: where was it?
Outside, Fenimore mounted his horse and made the now familiar journey to the town’s outskirts. Dawn was ascending and the view was magnificent. He couldn’t believe that only a few days earlier Hope Springs had been obscured by a milky fog. Today’s dawn would have eaten that fog for breakfast and demanded a thunderstorm for desert.
When he rode his way down the town’s neutral street, past the grave-maker’s workshop, Fenimore felt like he was entering a town that belonged to him. Desperation did funny things to a man’s understanding of ownership. As Master Taki once said, “The only difference between my bread and your bread is how hungry I am.” Want something enough and it becomes yours. He wondered whether Iron Rhodes had actually read the book by Master Taki sitting on the bookshelf in his steel study. It wasn’t one of the Master’s better ones.
Because it was early, the town square was empty and Fenimore stood awhile before checking to see if the miners had returned his message. They hadn’t. That wasn’t unexpected. The message had gone down the hole yesterday and today was only beginning. Part of Fenimore wanted the miners to be cautious, to talk it over before they brought the message back. He knew he didn’t have much time to spare, but if they delayed it meant they weren’t yet wholly desperate. For reasons he couldn’t understand, that made Fenimore happy.
At the the hotel desk, the hotel-keeper was reading a different book.
“Have any cigars for sale?” Fenimore asked.
The hotel-keeper pulled five and a book of matches out from under his desk.
Fenimore had four hundred dollars to pay with. He reached into his pocket and took a fistful of those dollars out.
“Gratis.”
Fenimore stopped thumbing the bills.
“That’s Latin for ‘it’s on the house’, already been paid for, courtesy of The Olympus.”
“Thank you,” Fenimore said, taking the matches and four of the cigars.
“Five your unlucky number?”
“I don’t believe in luck.”
The hotel-keeper shifted his attention away from the book he was reading, closing its covers carefully over his finger, so as not to lose his spot. “You don’t strike me as the type of man who takes less than is being offered.”
“I don’t strike you at all.”
“Suit yourself. One more to sell to somebody else.”
“No,” said Fenimore. “That one’s for you.”
“I don’t smoke cigars.”
“Keep it anyway, in case you change your mind. I’ve got a feeling in my gut that lots of things may be changing around here soon.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Fenimore turned toward the stairs. “It means I’m taking my bath earlier than usual today.”
That was Thursday. Thursday was a good day.
On Friday, there was a sheet of crumpled paper hidden at the feet of Rafael Rodriguez. It was Fenimore’s paper, but stained with several pairs of black fingerprints. So, Fenimore thought, the miners were aboard. Either that or Iron Rhodes was staging a sting, but a sting was unlikely given that he had more important things to worry about, such as making sure he had all his money together before packing up and turning tail.
Fenimore took out the second sheet of paper he’d taken from the notary, held it against Rafael Rodriguez’ shin and wrote the following:
Judgment Day nears. In the coming days, the tools of your salvation will begin arriving from Heaven. Their uses will be obvious. Do not use them prematurely. When the time comes, use them well. You will soon see the light, and the light will show the way to more tools.
Sincerely,
Your fellow conspirator
It was a touch dramatic, but Fenimore was proud of himself for writing it.
To celebrate, he retrieved one cigar and one match. He put the cigar in his mouth, lit the match against the statue, set fire to the first sheet of paper, and used the paper to light the cigar.
The paper became ash.
The cigar smoke tasted good.
When he was finished smoking, Fenimore rode his horse down the Rhodes street to the grey cement building called The House of Uncommons.
A few Rhodes stood leaning against its side.
“Morning, Messrs Rhodes,” Fenimore said.
“Morning, Mr Rhodes.”
Fenimore looked at the sky, then wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. “Hot day again.”
“Yeah,” one of the Rhodes said, “but my Missus says a storm be coming soon.”
The other rolled his eyes.
The sky was clear. Fenimore said, “On account of what?”
“Dead crows.”
The one who’d rolled his eyes spat, and mashed the spit into the earth with his boot.
Fenimore reached for the combination padlock on the door to the House of Uncommons.
“You’re new so you don’t know, but you need a signed written request, in triplicate, for us to open that for you.”
12-1-5. Click.
Fenimore grinned, and ducked inside.
“…and I don’t know what to do in a situation like that,” one of the Rhodes was saying. “I was never told.”
The stores of weapons and equipment were even more meagre than they’d been when Iron Rhodes had first given Fenimore his Rhodes grey. Nevertheless, Fenimore grabbed three revolvers—making sure to load their cylinders with bullets—and one hat. Three revolvers meant eighteen shots. Eighteen shots meant eight dead guards and ten misses. He hid all three revolvers under his coat. One hat meant less sun on Fenimore’s head. He donned it, and ducked back outside.
“Listen,” one of the guards said, grabbing his arm. The other was holding a document and a pen.
“Here.”
Fenimore looked at the document. Today’s date was already filled out for him. He added the rest under the indicated columns:
Morning / Hat / 1 / Mr Rhodes
He handed the pen and document back.
“Thanks.”
He tipped his newly acquired hat and got on his horse.
“What’s useful about hats,” the superstitious one said, “is that they’re good in the rain, too. That’s what my Missus says.”
As Fenimore rode away, he imagined the Rhodes’ Missus running about in the desert, wearing nothing but a hat, as a rain of dead crows fell from the sky. Even then, he decided, it would be better to have a hat than not.
He rode to the delivery hole.
It was covered by the red rock. The sky was blue. The surroundings were pale, sunlit and still.
A scorpion skittering across the desert floor broke the stillness.
Fenimore felt watched.
He straightened, squinted and looked around. There was nobody else.
He readied the hootin’ gun.
A vulture flew between him and the sun.
That there was nobody else didn’t mean much. Fenimore had watched the mine entrance without being seen, too. This was good hiding country.
It was also country for paranoia.
Fenimore lowered the hootin’ gun and uncovered the delivery hole by pushing aside the red rock with his boot. He picked up a different rock and wrapped his message around it. He took a final look around, and tossed that rock down the hole. It dropped silently, before hitting bottom with a loud thud.
Fenimore took the three revolvers from under his coat and dropped them one by one down the hole.
Thud, thud, thud.
He pushed the red rock back into position.
He rode into Hope Springs, tied his horse outside The Olympus and went inside.
“Things still changing?” the hotel keeper asked.
“Yeah,” Fenimore said.
The pails of hot water arrived within the hour.
Fenimore sat for a long time in the tub.
That was Friday.
Saturday morning came obscured by cloud cover. But no dead crows—yet. Fenimore put on his boots and enjoyed the coolness of the air. Tomorrow would be a big day. Today was for relaxing. Perhaps today he would even pay a social visit to the Sugarcane…
He walked past the statue of Rafael Rodriguez.
An envelope caught his eye.
He picked it up. It was unsealed and not addressed to anyone. Fenimore held it against the grey sky, then slid out and unfolded the letter written on heavy paper inside. The letter said:
Dear fellow conspirator,
I do not know who you are. You do not know who I am. Let us meet nowhere to exchange nothing. Money can be made.
Sincerely,
[Blank]
P.S. I know you and you know me.
P.P.S. Our usual place. Please use the ladder.
The handwriting was perfect and unmistakable, but how did the Widow Rodriguez know about his communications with the miners? Perhaps, Fenimore thought, he wasn’t the only one to see them as men with guns missing only the guns. But if that was true, it still didn’t explain why the Widow Rodriguez had played her hand so early.
Fenimore pocketed the letter and walked to the Sugarcane, but instead of taking the main entrance he rounded the corner to where he’d landed when he’d crashed through the window after Ezekiel Picasso had come looking for him. He was not surprised to see a ladder leaning against the side of the building, leading to the glassless window on the second floor.
He climbed the ladder and stepped into the room.
The Widow Rodriguez feigned shock.
“Mr Rhodes! Coming in like that through a lady’s window—why, she could be changing into her Sunday best, or worse…”
“It’s Saturday. You’re wearing black.”
“Yes, of course.” She grinned. “How silly of me.”
“What nothing do you want to exchange?”
“Whatever do you mean?
Fenimore crossed the room to the door, which was open, and peered down the hall. It was empty. He closed the door.
“The ladder.”
“I’m having the glass in the window replaced. You do remember breaking it, don’t you?”
Fenimore growled.
The Widow Rodriguez said, “But if you want to talk about nothing, we can start with the nothing you’ve done for me since we made our deal.”
“Or the nothing you’ve paid.”
“Now, now, Mr Rhodes, let’s not compare guns this early in the day.” She fixed her dress. “Why don’t you tell me how you’re coming along finding what it is I asked you to find.”
“I haven’t found it.”
“Yes,” she said, “you’ve been a busy stranger, and I’m apparently not high on your list of priorities.”
“It’s been only a few days.”
“Yet you’ve managed to accomplish a lot in those days, haven’t you?”
He didn’t say anything.
“For example, I didn’t know you were interested in mining, Mr Rhodes.”
“I’ll find the ledger.”
“Forget about the ledger. What do you want from the miners?”
“A job.”
“You’re quite the collector of jobs, but forgive me, it was a serious question.”
“Why do you think I want anything from them?”
“I know you want something from them—” She clasped her hands in front of her body, as if in prayer. “—because it’s amazing what men will tell you when you’ve got them trapped between your legs. Some will talk when you beg them, others when you dig your nails into the skin on their backs and force them, and once you’ve done that it’s never too difficult to direct the conversation by rubbing your lips on all the right places.”
“Are you often amazed?”
“Yes. Now returning to my question…”
“I want justice.”
The Widow Rodriguez laughed like a drunken hyena.
Fenimore betrayed nothing with his eyes. His eyelids didn’t even twitch. He hadn’t been lying.
“For whom?” she asked.
“The highest bidder.”
“And who would that be, Mr Rhodes, the man who paid you to kill a child, or the man who paid you to let that child live?”
She pushed her body against his.
“Or the woman who’s fooling them both,” he said.
She put her lips next to his ear. “Somehow, I don’t think that’s the case, Mr Rhodes.” She stroked his hair. “Pablito Picasso’s hidden in my cellar. Three times a day, I bring him food. He’s scared. Sometimes, he asks me to hug him. Sometimes, when I do, he tries to touch me like a boy shouldn’t. Dead boys, I am quite sure, do not have curious fingers.”
Fenimore kept his own fingers off the Widow Rodriguez’ body. He had a feeling her body might be made of ice. “What do you want me to do for you?”
“I don’t want to ruin a funeral. I don’t want to take away a family’s chance to grieve.”
“You want to buy me.”
She pushed herself away from him. “Oh, no, Mr Rhodes. I have already bought you, once, but you were stolen goods. I was buying from you something which already belonged to another—to two others.” She smiled. “At any rate, I don’t have the resources for a bidding war. Today, I am not buying you, Mr Rhodes. I am threatening you. I am blackmailing you. If you don’t do as I say, I will bring Pablito Picasso back to life. I will revive him on the steps of Iron Rhodes’s mansion, yelling, ‘Miracle! Miracle!’ and Iron Rhodes will kill you, for he doesn’t believe in miracles.”
“Do you believe in Hell?”
“I believe you will do as I tell you to do because you want to live, which is its own Hell. For you, of course.”
Fenimore considered his situation. It was bad, but better than it could have been. As long as he was still useful to the Widow Rodriguez, she would keep his secret. He would keep breathing. The trick was to keep himself useful until the gundown ensued.
“Most men play one side,” she said. “A handful play two. You will play three, and you will play all three of them for me.”
“How will I play?”
“Well.”
“So blackmail me.”
“Mr Rhodes, don’t talk so filthy. First, let me repeat my question. For which of your two false masters are you negotiating with the miners?”
“None.”
The Widow Rodriguez raised a threatening eyebrow, under which Fenimore seemed like a quivering toad. Telling the truth was becoming second nature.
“The Rhodes wouldn’t need me to communicate with the miners. They control them as things stand,” Fenimore said. “And the Picassos already have an advantage in terms of numbers.”
“You make sense, Mr Rhodes. Continue.”
“But what if there weren’t three sides, but four?”
“The miners as an independent force.”
Fenimore nodded.
“Under your command?”
“Under their own command.”
“I fail to see the point, by which I mean your point. Where’s your cut?”
“Justice,” Fenimore said.
She disregarded the word. “A man plays three sides to create a fourth. The fourth means nothing to the man. The man gains how?”
“The man needs an out.”
The Widow Rodriguez cocked her head to the side. Her hair fell neatly over her shoulder. “If he needs an out, he’s taking something with him, which means he’s not playing for honest wages.”
“Do you always fuck for money?”
The Widow Rodriguez slid her knife out of her sleeve and twirled it between her fingers. “I’ve fucked for love,” she said.
“And information.”
“Yes, we think alike, Mr Rhodes, but you are mistaken about the number of sides playing a game you’ve already lost. Yet consider yourself lucky, because I can offer you a generous consolation prize. The miners are my side. When they fight, they will fight for me. But three pistols—it’s hardly enough for a bluff, let alone a true play.”
“That’s why you need me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t need your finger on the trigger, however talented that finger may be. No, I need your finger on the trigger simply to acquire more triggers.”
At last the Widow Rodriguez had arrived at the point, Fenimore thought.
“I have been in contact with my colleagues in Sliver City,” she said. “They’ve informed me that there’s a shipment of guns travelling the country, on its way from one place to another, that on this evening will pass within several miles of Hope Springs. The shipment will be disguised as a single wagon bearing the sign ‘Ye Olde Rolling Musical Shoppe’. Inside the wagon will be pianos. Inside the pianos are guns.”
“I’m to rob the wagon?”
“You are to acquire the guns, Mr Rhodes.”
“And the men in the wagon?”
The Widow Rodriguez gazed out the window. “They still have the afternoon to enjoy. No man is ever guaranteed a tomorrow.”
“How many men?”
“More than one, less than six.”
“You expect me to rob six armed men by myself?”
“Perhaps.”
“Perhaps not?”
“As I said, there may be only one, but I can’t offer any odds. And as I haven’t said, you will not be alone. I have three men of my own.” The Widow Rodriguez whistled. “Regardless, one would be a fool not to play the odds, no matter how bad, if the alternative is guaranteed death. I therefore take it you will agree.”
With that, Fenimore couldn’t argue.
The door opened.
Three whores filed in, led by the buxom barmaid Olivia.
Before Fenimore could protest, “I meant men more in the figurative sense,” the Widow Rodriguez said. But, Fenimore had to admit, Olivia did look as vicious as any of the Rhodes or Picasso men he’d seen in the past few days, with the possible exception of Ezekiel Picasso, and the two women flanking her were only slightly less so.
“We don’t like it when one of our own dies,” the Widow Rodriguez said. “We take exception.”
Olivia stroked the rifle she was carrying. She and the other two women were wearing leather boots and riding clothes. They looked at once imposing and ridiculous.
“Have they robbed anything before?” Fenimore asked.
“I would never have expected you to ask such a stupid question, Mr Rhodes. You are aware of what kind of establishment you’re in, yes?”
“Have they ever fired a gun?”
There was no sarcastic reply to this.
“Once, when I was a girl,” Olivia said, “at vermin.”
The other two shook their heads. “We are prepared for it,” one of them said, but Fenimore wasn’t sure whether she meant shooting or death.
“The vermin splattered.”
Fenimore considered his lack of options and what would happen if they were successful in their robbery. If they weren’t, there would be nothing to worry about. He needed to remain useful.
“I know the exact time and place where the Rhodes will ambush the Picassos,” he said.
The Widow Rodriguez stopped playing with her knife.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Insurance.”
“Or it could be another lie. You’ve been known to tell those. A man’s reputation travels.”
“It could be. That’s a matter of odds, and you’re more than intrigued but less than certain, yet when you think of the alternative I’m sure we agree.”
“I don’t plan on shooting you, Mr Rhodes.”
Fenimore smirked. “Not anymore.”
Evening redness draped itself over the empty landscape several miles outside of Hope Springs. It looked like the eroded bed of a blood ocean. As the light darkened, the redness turned to black, and the ocean evaporated, leaving only the condor fish and crab scorpions and the four riders, whose dark figures even the night could not consume.
Fenimore sat next to Olivia, whose long hair blew across her face in the breeze.
Behind them: the trembling bodies of the two other whores. Because the evening was hot, they could not pretend to be shaking from the cold.
Fenimore raised his right arm, in which he held the hootin’ gun. He wiped his forehead with it, knocking back the brim of his hat. Although there was no reason to doubt the Widow Rodriguez’ information, he found it difficult to believe that anything, let alone a wagon full of pianos stuffed with firepower, could break this silence.
One of the whores coughed.
Even her cough sounded scared. Olivia looked back and said, “It’ll be soon now. When it’s over, when it’s all over, they won’t have died for nothing.”
“I hate them,” the whore said.
“I hate them, too,” Olivia said, and looked back at Fenimore, who was watching the horizon.
They’d gone over the plan several times. It was a simple one. They would approach the wagon together. Once they were close, Fenimore would ride the final distance himself. He’d do the talking. They’d stay far enough away to make it difficult to identify them as women. They’d keep the violence to a minimum. If the men cooperated—
“How many times you done this before?” Olivia asked.
The breeze picked up.
“Robbed a wagon?”
“Yeah.”
“Never,” Fenimore said.
“I been robbed once. In a wagon, I mean. I was a girl. I was with my momma.”
“Yeah?”
“I wouldn’t tell lies.”
“How was it?”
Fenimore’s eyes didn’t leave their marks.
“Deadly,” Olivia said. “They were desperate men, the stink of sweat on their dark skin. They circled us, making their Spanish noises till we stopped. There were four of us inside, other than my momma and me. Three men and a woman, making three each altogether, except I was still a girl and looked like a boy. That’s what everybody said.”
“That so?”
“We handed everything over, despite that none of us knew what they were yelling. We figured that was the best course of action, on account of staying safe. While they were taking and loading the things into their sacks, they kept their guns on us, but their hands were unsteady like a drunkard’s. You could see the tiredness in their cheeks, and the guns shook. You could see their lust, too. Like animals. So even when they’d taken everything, you could see they wanted more, wanted what only three of us could give, except maybe me, on account of what I said earlier. So one of them gets a real lusty look on his face and grabs the woman who isn’t my momma by the arm and starts pulling her out of the wagon. When he does, he throws her to the ground. Then he does the same to my momma. But because there’s only two women and more of them, and the numbers don’t match, odd and even, they start arguing. While they’re arguing, momma takes one of the pins out of her hair. I see it glint, sharp, in the sunlight. And she hides it in her fist. Eventually the men settle and come up with an order to do the taking in, so one of them starts on the woman, who’s crying hard, and another starts on momma, but momma isn’t crying and she’s got the pin in her fist, and when the man starts getting enough pleasure on his face, she stabs him in the eye with the pin. The man starts screaming, blood coming out of his eye, and he starts swinging at momma, who rolls away, and then the men in the wagon start firing.”
Olivia’s voice broke.
“I put my hands on my head and made myself small, like momma had taught me to do when there’s firing. And when it was over, it got quiet and I took my hands off my head and opened my eyes, and all the Mexicans and momma were dead on the ground outside the wagon.”
She gripped her rifle tight. One of the whore’s horses whinnied. A shooting star fell in the twilit sky.
“They told me my momma was a hero, the three men. They said she had a man’s bravery. I said it didn’t matter whether she was a hero or a fool. What mattered to me was my momma, and after that day she was gone, and I haven’t ever had a momma again. The last time I saw her was the day they put her in the ground. There weren’t many people, not even the three men or the woman, and momma’s face was so beaten that the funeral man put a veil on it because he couldn’t paint her up to look as beautiful as she did before. Later, I talked to the woman in the wagon. I found her in a town called Armadillo Shielding. It was two years on and I was a woman, no longer looking like a boy, and she’d gotten married and had a boy of her own. She didn’t want to talk to me, but when she did, she said that even when the firing had started, after my momma had put her pin in that Mexican’s eye, he didn’t reach for his guns. He just kept swinging his fists. Swinging them wild until finally he hit my momma, and she stopped moving, and he kept hitting her until the bullets ripped him up and he was dead, and momma was dead, too, beaten into her grave by a desperate, sweat stinking Mexican who wanted to beat her more than he wanted to save himself.”
Olivia dug her heels into her horse’s side and circled around until she was in front of Fenimore, between him and the horizon, and he couldn’t look through her, so he looked at her and she looked at him.
“I don’t know who you are,” she said, “but I feel the air of the wronged man about you. Now, maybe you are and maybe you aren’t, that isn’t mine to say, and I know you aren’t here by choice, but you also stink of importance, and I just want to tell you that you don’t know a damn about being wronged till you’ve been a woman.”
“You’re in my way. I can’t see,” Fenimore said.
“That is why I’m in your way. I want you to see. I want you to see what it is we’re doing here.”
“The Widow Rodriguez informed me.”
“A city for women,” Olivia said. “She has not informed you of that. Hope Springs can be a haven. Once we burn the infestation, we can plant the seeds of paradise…”
Fenimore admired the way the Widow Rodriguez manufactured loyalty by appealing to festering wounds and fanaticism, but he also felt sorry for Olivia. He said, “Are you ready to raise your rifle and take a man down to harvest these seeds?”
“Yes.”
To Fenimore, that meant it was no paradise.
“And you,” she asked, “have you ever hated someone more than you love yourself?”
He nodded. “But I don’t love myself much.”
“Men are sick.”
Men, Fenimore thought without saying it, had kept Olivia alive. One pin to the eye was not salvation. A hundred bullets was salvation. “A man,” he said, “is what you need to get these guns. Now move out of the way and let me see.”
She circled the rest of the way around him until she was back where she’d started.
They still hadn’t discussed what to do with the men in the wagon. Fenimore still wasn’t sure what they’d do with him. He was wondering about both questions when the wagon sprouted out of the horizon like a cancer.
The whores froze.
Olivia raised her rifle and looked at the wagon through its sights.
“Remember the plan,” Fenimore said.
He lifted his arm.
When the wagon had stopped being a growth and became an audible greyness, he lowered his arm and the four of them rode forward to cross the wagon’s path.
A single driver sat out front.
Fenimore lifted his arm again and the whores stopped.
He continued forward.
The driver slowed the wagon and called out, “Greetings, rider. How may we be of assistance? We mean no harm ourselves, and are just passing through this country, onward toward other climates.”
The driver was smiling, rotund and wore glasses below a bowler hat. The wagon had ‘Ye Olde Rolling Musical Shoppe’ written on its side.
Fenimore kept the hootin’ gun lowered. “Evening,” he said. “I am passing through, myself.”
“And your men?”
“Passing through, too.” The driver’s eyesight was sharp. “We are looking for an outlaw named”—Fenimore saw no reason not to give it a try.—“Ulrich. He rides with five others, called Constanza, The Slovak, Butcher Bellicose, Tartaro, and The Little Pimp. Have you any word?”
The driver removed the bowler hat from his head and laid it, opening up, on his lap.
“Only the same words as everybody else, stranger. I come by way of Sliver City, where the saloons are buzzing with rumours.”
Fenimore noted the I. “What do the rumours say?”
“They say seven men did a daylight job on the university in Samanthaton. They call it the heist of the century. Daring, to say the least—if it’s true. But not even the most imaginative gossips went so far as to guess at what was stolen. The official line, of course, is nothing.”
“May I inspect your wagon?”
“Nondescript.”
“I meant the interior.”
“You’ll merely find pianos, stranger.” The driver placed his right hand inside his bowler hat.
“And I’m interested in outlaws, not instruments, so it would be a brief inspection.” Fenimore noted the curtains in the wagon’s windows.
The driver chuckled. “I am already behind schedule, but if you insist…”
One of the curtains fluttered.
The driver lifted his hat as if to put it back on his head—then jerked his arm and shot through the hat.
Fenimore pulled his reins.
The driver’s shot vanished into the nighttime.
A curtain disappeared. An elbow shattered one of the wagon’s windows.
Fenimore, riding, lifted the hootin’ gun to eye level, rested its nozzle on one of his arms, and steadied himself as best as he could on horseback.
The driver shot through the bowler hat again.
Olivia and the two whores descended upon the wagon.
Fenimore shot.
The driver ducked, Fenimore’s bullet splintered the wood where his head had just been, and he yelled something like a “Yee haw!” at the wagon’s horses, which jerked the whole contraption forward so hard that its wheels creaked.
Fenimore kept his rifle trained on the driver, who kept his head down.
The whores joined the pursuit.
A man’s body leaned out of the window that had been shattered.
Fenimore matched the wagon’s increasing pace and took another crack at the driver.
Another miss.
The shooter shot down one of the whores.
She fell off her horse, which kept abreast of the other one, and her foot caught in the stirrup, causing her to get dragged behind.
Olivia raised herself off her saddle, aimed her rifle, and destroyed the shooter’s arm like it was nothing but a vermin. The destruction left a spray of blood.
She rode through it with her screaming mouth open.
The other whore unloaded six pistol shots in the general direction of the wagon. None of them hit.
She reloaded.
The wagon rattled but rolled.
The wounded whore managed to pull herself back onto her horse, a dark stain expanding on the shoulder of her white shirt, but another shot sent both her and her horse crumbling to the flat, rocky ground.
The shot had come from roof.
The wagon’s left wheel hit a rut—the wagon skidded.
The shooter on the roof lost his balance, rolled, and disappeared off the edge.
Olivia cut her speed, then cut across to the other side, barely avoiding a bullet meant for her head, where the shooter was hanging by one hand from the roof and three arms were trying to pull him in through a window.
Fenimore closed one eye, estimated the wagon’s path, and shot another rut into the ground.
Olivia shot and killed the shooter.
The three arms didn’t realise they held a corpse.
The wagon hit the rut.
The driver almost dropped his bowler hat.
The three arms let go of the corpse, which hit the ground like the heavy chunk of meat that it was.
The remaining whore closed to within feet of the wagon and unloaded six more shots. These hit through the wood, glass and curtain.
The responding shot hit through bone.
The whore’s jaw exploded.
She dropped her chin to her chest, her chest to her horse’s neck, and her horse stopped chasing the wagon.
Fenimore and Olivia galloped on, kicking up dust.
The driver beat more speed into his horses, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The wagon would never outrun its pursuers.
He yelled “Yee haw!” and took a potshot at Olivia, who didn’t even flinch, but bent her body forward and brought the barrel of her rifle closer to the rider’s plump figure.
Fenimore closed the distance, too.
The driver raised his bowler hat—and froze. Perhaps for the first time, he realised that one of his pursuers was a woman.
“Bitch!”
The back of the driver’s head made an inviting target for Fenimore.
Olivia raised her rifle.
The driver straightened his arm. “Fucking bitch!”
The hootin’ gun expelled a bullet. The bullet punctured the air and expelled the insides of the driver’s head through his contorted face.
The driver’s arm fell.
Olivia rode through the bloody spray.
Fenimore brought his horse side-by-side to the wagon’s horses, stood, and, keeping his balance, leapt.
Olivia sent two rifle shots into the body of the wagon.
Bang, bang!
Fenimore climbed up next to the driver’s dead body and pulled on the reins to bring the wagon to a gradual stop.
When everything was still, Olivia poked her rifle through one of the wagon’s broken windows.
“Anyone still living?”
Fenimore had pulled the driver’s body to the ground and was going through its pockets, but all he found was a card. The card said “Olivier” in big golden letters. He pocketed the card. Vultures might eat a lot, but they wouldn’t eat paper and it was better that Olivier never be identified.
Someone gurgled: “Don’t shoot. I give—”
Bang.
Olivia used her rifle to clear the remnants of jutting glass in the window, tore down the curtain and looked inside.
“Pianos?” Fenimore asked.
“Yes.”
Fenimore looked, too.
Inside there were three bodies, two men and a child. Warm, dripping guts decorated the walls and gathered in puddles on the floor. None of the bodies moved. One of the men was missing an arm, which lay, blown off, under one of three black pianos.
Olivia spat.
Fenimore climbed inside and popped open the top of a piano. The Widow Rodriguez hadn’t lied. The piano was filled with guns and ammunition. He popped the tops of the other two pianos. They held weapons, too.
Olivia whistled.
“Tie the horses to the wagon. We’ll ride it back into town,” Fenimore said.
“And the bodies?”
“Strip their clothes. We’ll drop them along the way. When we’re done unloading the guns, take the wagon into the desert and burn it.”
Olivia went about tying their horses.
Fenimore remembered the two fallen whores. “And your friends?”
Olivia tightened a simple knot and stared off into the great American West. Her face was stained solid with fresh blood. If any tears welled in her eyes, Fenimore didn’t see them. “Martyrs,” she said. “If we see them, we’ll take them aboard. They’ll burn with the wagon.”
Three bodies to drop, two to pick up. It was ghastly arithmetic that in some deranged way meant they’d won. Fenimore had also won. The guns had been acquired and he was still alive. Olivia hadn’t put a bullet in his back. Relief: it felt like wanting to throw up.
When the horses were tied and Fenimore had stripped the driver of his clothes—naked, he resembled Dead Pedro—Olivia climbed into the wagon and Fenimore got the horses moving forward for a while before turning the wagon around and starting their return trip to Hope Springs.
They passed the first dead whore.
She was jawless and there was terror in her eyes. Olivia pulled her into the wagon and pushed out the body of the one-armed man.
They passed the second whore.
She wasn’t dead. She was merely unconscious, with a nasty bullet hole in her shoulder.
Fenimore helped Olivia lift her up and put her on the wagon floor, where they ripped off a strip of her riding shirt and tied it above her wound. She moaned but otherwise didn’t move. When she was as comfortable as they could make her, Fenimore grabbed the legs of the second dead man and pulled him to the ground.
He had had a dream once. There was a shootout, and when everyone was dead, all the dead men’s faces were mirrors…
“You in love?”
Fenimore shook his head. Olivia was eyeing him from the wagon window. Fenimore was eyeing the dead man. Fenimore got the wagon moving again. When Hope Springs appeared, he turned his head and asked, “What about the third body?”
“Let that one burn.”
They rode Hope Spring’s neutral main street quietly, under the cover of gathering grey clouds.
They stopped the wagon at the back of the Sugarcane.
The Widow Rodriguez appeared, flanked by several women. Her witch’s face shone with expectation.
“My dear stranger, it seems that you have returned victorious. I commend you.”
“One dead,” Fenimore said, “one injured.”
“Yes, yes. And the guns?”
“Inside.”
The Widow Rodriguez rubbed her hands together and licked her lips, which were uncharacteristically dry. Death, Fenimore reminded himself, was wet.
He opened the wagon door.
Inside, Olivia had arranged the bodies of the dead whore and the dead child to look as if they’d died together, mother and son. “She always wanted,” Olivia said, her voice breaking. Tears had welled this time. “But she couldn’t…”
The tears left streaks on her red cheeks.
They lifted the body of the injured whore out of the wagon. Several women helped carry her into the brothel, then down a flight of stairs to one of several small rooms. Pablito Picasso probably hid in another.
The whore moaned again. She might live, Fenimore guessed. Her arm would not.
Perhaps in paradise that wouldn’t matter.
When Fenimore emerged from downstairs, the Widow Rodriguez was waiting for him. “Now the guns, stranger. Unload the guns.”
She was feverish and Fenimore entertained the theory that he was alive now only for the purpose of manual labour, but it was of little significance. It was pure emotion. He, Olivia and several women got to work, carrying the bounty from the wagon to a main floor storeroom. The Widow Rodriguez did not lift a finger.
Once all the guns and ammunition had been deposited, she caught Fenimore by the bend of his elbow. They were alone. “I am impressed,” she said. It sounded sincere, until Fenimore remembered her ability to act. “I didn’t give you much of a chance of success. But, now, a man of such masculine virtues and useful skills, I could see myself in need of you—”
“In a city of women.”
The Widow Rodriguez laughed without loosening her grip on Fenimore’s elbow. “We are not all motivated by money. Some of us have ideals.”
Fenimore ripped his arm away and walked outside.
Olivia had just shut the wagon door on the grimly maternal scene inside.
“I’ll burn it,” she said. “I’ll watch it turn black.”
Fenimore noticed how good and big her breasts looked under her riding shirt. He was shocked he’d not noticed them before, when they were riding together.
“Men are sick,” she said.
“Women, too,” he said back at her. “Anybody who wants something is sick.”
“You want to come with me, to the burning?”
“No.”
The real burning was still to come. That’s what Fenimore settled his mind to as he walked the length of the street, all the way from the statue of Rafael Rodriguez to the grave-maker’s workshop.
Bells twinkled above the door.
The grave-maker scurried in from a back room.
“Good evening.” He surveyed Fenimore’s face without identifying it. “Do you require a grave?”
“I hear business has been good.”
“Lots of sadness.”
“Lots of dollars.”
“Lots of loss.”
“Lots of profit.”
Fenimore pulled two hundred dollars from his pocket, at the sight of which the grave-maker’s eyelashes fluttered, and placed them on a nearby coffin.
The grave-maker’s saliva caught in his throat, causing him to stutter. “What can I do for you, sir?”
“I’d like to rent your hearse,” Fenimore said.
“It’s not for rent, but perhaps we could come to another arrangement. In fact, I am sure we could, a man of your means, we might…”
“Two hundred dollars for your hearse, including your horses, for twenty-four hours.”
“Which twenty-four?”
That was the question. But it was a question to which only Fenimore knew the answer. Indeed, it was the very question he had been trying to answer on his walk here.
Today was May 17. Tomorrow would be Pablito Picasso’s funeral. There needed to be time after, but not too much time. There was a limit to the amount of tension one could endure. Everything breaks. Therefore, a good date for the final gundown was:
“May twenty-fifth.”
“Two hundred?” the grave-maker repeated, as if to make sure his hearing was good.
Fenimore left the money on the coffin. “And more sadness and loss than you can imagine.”
The grave-maker’s eyelashes fluttered again.
Fenimore turned.
“But, if you wouldn’t mind my asking, why do you need a hearse…” the grave-maker said. However, he said it weakly, and only after Fenimore had passed into the street.
Fenimore walked the distance from the workshop to The Olympus slowly.
The end was in sight. The money was within reach. The date of the gundown had been set. Now all that Fenimore needed to do was to make the gundown come true.
He looked up.
It was time to make the dirty cotton ball clouds rain crow.
The pitter patter of persistent raindrops sounded like the tapping of spider feet on the window of the hotel room where Fenimore lay on his back in bed with his eyes open, listening to the wisps of mournful music that floated between them—the spider’s tappings—from the funeral being held this Sunday morning for a boy who wasn’t dead as proof that Fenimore was a man of his word. Although he hadn’t slept, it was the tapping that eventually brought Fenimore back to reality. In that instant, he understood the fate of Ignacio Picasso.
He got to his feet, walked to the window and opened it.
The music got louder. The raindrops splashed against his face and the tongue of his gasping mouth, and rippled the surface of the cold water in the tub. Fenimore submerged his head in it. Now that truly woke a man up.
Although already partly dressed, he donned the rest of his clothes, including his boots and hat, grabbed the hootin’ gun and walked downstairs.
“Doesn’t bode well for peace,” the hotel-keeper said.
“Keep your cigar dry.”
Outside The Olympus, Fenimore’s horse nibbled feed from a trough, paying no attention to the weather behind it. Its wet coat shone.
The ground shone, too, but it was packed so hard from so many feet that as Fenimore walked there wasn’t even a trace of mud under his boots.
He crossed the square.
The statue of Rafael Rodriguez looked down from its inhuman height and cried. Whether by accident or mastery of craft, the rain that gathered on its stone brows swam into its eyes and flowed down its cheeks. The two streams hit the ground just behind where Rafael Rodriguez’ two severed, revolver-wielding arms had been laid.
Fenimore leaned his back against a wooden wall under one of the overhanging roofs of the buildings on the other side of the square, crossed his arms in front of his body, and waited. The weight of the hootin’ gun felt comforting.
Tiny particles of time fell sometimes between the drops of water.
Fenimore took the seven coins out of his pocket and reached out with his hand into the rain to wash them. Some were too filthy to wash. Others needed to be scratched clean with a fingernail, and then the grimy underside of that fingernail scratched cleaned with another coin.
The rain intensified.
The sounds of the funeral endured.
Sunlight broke through the clouds as splotches of light on the packed, wet ground.
“Hideous gringo grey,” a voice shouted.
Fenimore saw a lone figure stumbling along from the Picasso end of town. It took a few steps, fell to its knees, got up, took a few more steps, and repeated, “Hideous gringo grey… child killer… armour against the grey, child killing bastards.”
The splotches of light floated across the ground.
“Killer of children, wearer of grey!”
The door to the notary’s office opened and three Rhodes filed out. They were armed. They looked at the Picasso, who kept stumbling, saying, “Kill the gringos, bastards, armour,” and falling, coming closer and closer to the statue of Rafael Rodriguez.
“Stop!” one of the Rhodes called out.
The others raised their pistols.
Fenimore pushed off from the wall and walked into the falling rain.
One of the pistols turned to point at him, before its holder recognised his Rhodes grey and shifted back to the drunk Picasso, who hiccupped another curse.
“Come any further and we’ll make you stop.”
Fenimore settled in beside the three Rhodes. He raised the hootin’ gun. “What do you say, Messrs Rhodes, let’s catch and torture this one.”
The Picasso raised his fist and shook it. “Rhodes gringo scum, all of you, I come to revenge myself for the soul of”—He fell over and puked.—“the innocent Pablito Picasso.” He got up, wiped the puke from his hands on his pants and reached for one of his two revolvers. He wrapped his trembling fingers around it, slipped it out of the holster…
Fenimore put a shot into the ground so close to his feet that the Picasso dropped the revolver and fell backward, into a splotch of light. He scrunched up his eyes.
Fenimore stalked toward him.
The three Rhodes stayed where they were.
The notary watched from a window.
“Hands up.”
The Picasso didn’t move, but when Fenimore was within a few steps, he hiccupped again, and tried to wink.
Fenimore kicked him hard in the gut.
As he was writhing on the ground, Fenimore reached into the Picasso’s other holster and pulled out his second revolver. He tossed both revolvers back to the three Rhodes, before pressing the barrel of the hootin’ gun against the Picasso’s forehead. “Public intoxication is against the law.”
The four of them walked the Picasso down the Rhodes street to the Rhodes fortress: three peacocks and Fenimore. In desperate times, even underlings will fight for scraps of recognition and attention.
“I want to pull out his fingernails,” one of them said.
Another suggested melted testicles.
Fenimore kept a hard grip on the Picasso’s wrists behind the Picasso’s back. When they arrived at the gate, he yelled, “Antoninus Pius.” Goggles peeked over the wall. He opened the gate. They walked through and up the steps, where Fenimore did the appropriate knock, and the front door opened, and they walked inside.
The men in the bespoke suits sat in their usual spot, drinking their usual brandy.
“By the Almighty, would you look at the size of the rat the cats dragged in.”
“I would look, I would.”
“This one was loitering in the square, drunk and shouting profanities against us,” one of the Rhodes said after getting prodded in the ribs by another. “Mr Rhodes said we could bring him in and torture him.”
They all looked at Fenimore.
“Mr Rhodes,” one of the men in the bespoke suits said, “is this true?”
“With the approval of Justice Rhodes.”
“How quickly he learns.”
“I’ll lock him in a cell,” Fenimore said.
“By all means.”
Fenimore tugged the Picasso by the wrists and spun him round so that they could march down the hall together, down the stairs to the dungeons. Behind him, one of the men in the bespoke suits said, “Yes? You are waiting for? Back to work, Mr Rhodes and Mr Rhodes and…”
The dungeons were as damp as the outside world.
Fenimore led the Picasso to the spying room, unlocked the door and pushed him inside.
“Do you have paper and something to write with?”
The Picasso nodded.
“Listen. Write down what you hear.”
“Yes, yes,” the Picasso mumbled, “but when will I get out of here? And will we really kill the bastard who killed Pablito?”
Fenimore locked the door.
After climbing the stairs, when he was within sight of the men in the bespoke suits and before they could send him away, he said, “Messrs Rhodes, I would like to request an audience with Justice Rhodes.”
“Impossible.”
“Utterly.”
They both took sips of their brandy.
“Justice Rhodes has specifically asked not be disturbed.”
“And, hence, specifically, utterly impossible.”
“Rhodesium,” Fenimore said.
The bottle of brandy smashed on the floor. The one who’d knocked it over bit his lip. The other said, “I shall see what can be arranged.”
“Time is of the essence.”
They rose at the same time and ambled over to the heavy door to Iron Rhodes’ steel study.
One knocked.
The other whispered something.
They returned to their bench, beside which the brandy was an expanding puddle in a mess of glass. “Justice Rhodes will see you now. Please do not waste his time as we have wasted our drink.” They giggled.
Fenimore knocked on the heavy door.
“Enter.”
Fenimore did, but he didn’t close the door behind himself, and when Iron Rhodes was about to speak, he put a finger to his lips and reached for a sheet of paper that was on Iron Rhodes’ desk. The sheet was filled with equations and numbers and dollars signs. Fenimore motioned for a pen and Iron Rhodes handed it to him.
Fenimore wrote:
“Not safe to talk here. Spies listening.”
Iron Rhodes’ jaws tightened.
Fenimore wrote:
“Will explain all. Is there safer place to talk?”
As Iron Rhodes rose from his seat, Fenimore thought he looked ready to crush skulls and beat bones into powder, but Iron Rhodes remained silent. Grabbing the sheet of paper, he strode out of the room. Fenimore followed.
The two of them walked the length of the main room to the front door, then turned left and arrived at the vertical bars that guarded the vault.
“Hand me your rifle,” Iron Rhodes said.
Fenimore handed it.
“Strip.”
Fenimore got naked and laid his clothes in a pile on the floor by the bars.
Iron Rhodes retrieved the steel rod from his breast pocket and knocked it against one of the bars. The bars slid open. Iron Rhodes stepped through, saying, “You, too, Mr Rhodes.” Fenimore didn’t disobey. The bars slid closed and Fenimore found himself naked and with a gun pointed at him for the second time in several weeks.
“That is far enough,” Iron Rhodes said.
They had rounded one corner and were in a narrow hall that led to another.
“Now, speak,” Iron Rhodes said. “Explain.”
A vein in his forehead was pulsing and Fenimore saw that the stress was taking its toll on his sanity. He hoped the same wasn’t true of his rationality, or trigger finger. He decided it was nevertheless best to be as brief, clear and free of contractions as possible. “There is a cell downstairs,” he said. “Sound travels from your study to this cell. Anyone in the cell can hear everything said in your study. When he was still alive, that is how Pablito Picasso spied on you.”
At first, Iron Rhodes didn’t react. The information merely soaked into his pores.
Fenimore wanted to peek around the second corner and see the contents of the vault. It was good to see first what one planned to take later.
Finally, Iron Rhodes said, “Tell me how you know.”
“Before I killed Pablito Picasso, I made him talk. I told him I would spare his life if he told me everything he knew—all the Picasso secrets.”
“And he told how he spied.”
“Yes.”
“What else?”
“He told me that Ignacio Picasso is dying.”
That bit of information didn’t seem to be news. “Did he say anything about armour, metals?”
“No, but…”
“But…”
“This morning, after Pablito Picasso’s funeral, a Picasso wandered into the town square. He was drunk and he was cursing. He was cursing you and us, and one of the words he kept repeating was ‘armour’.”
Iron Rhodes lowered the hootin’ gun.
“Did you kill him?”
“I brought him in. I said it was for questioning, but that is not quite true.”
The vein on Iron Rhodes’ forehead stopped pulsing and cold reason regained control of his face.
“I locked him in the cell that Pablito Picasso used to spy on you, because I had an idea,” Fenimore said.
“You have known about this cell for days and yet are only telling me now, Mr Rhodes?”
“The cell was empty.”
“You did not answer my question.”
“I waited until the information was worth more.”
“Yet you have now freely volunteered it, or am I misunderstanding?”
Fenimore glanced at the hootin’ gun. “I do not appear to be in a position to blackmail.”
Iron Rhodes kept the gun pointed down.
“What is your idea?”
“To set up an ambush by feeding false information to the Picassos through the prisoner locked in the cell.”
“How do you profit?”
“You pay me, Justice Rhodes.”
Iron Rhodes tapped the hootin’ gun against the floor and dug his middle finger into the deep creases on his handsome face. His skin barely moved. His breathing slowed.
“How much?”
“Ten thousand dollars,” Fenimore said. He hoped he’d hit the right balance between ambitious and reasonable.
“Or I could kill you.”
“And all my ideas with me.”
“Not this one.”
“The beauty of a single tree is that—”
“…it yields much fruit. Find one apple, wait, find many. J.S. Taki.”
“The Opening of the American West.” So, Fenimore thought, Iron Rhodes had read it.
“A man of ideas.”
Fenimore was unsure whether Iron Rhodes meant Master Taki or him. “Yes,” he said anyway. Though he was tempted to follow up with a question about the sound lock, he resisted the temptation.
“About this ambush, have you also dreamed up the specifics?”
Fenimore smiled. “Ten thousand dollars’ worth.”
Back in Iron Rhodes’ steel study, Fenimore and Iron Rhodes acted out these specifics under the red-haired gaze of Katie O’Rourke and for the benefit of the Picasso in the dungeons, who, Fenimore hoped, was writing them all down. To make sure, they went over the most important details several times:
On May 25, a secret supply of guns was going to be arriving in Hope Springs for the benefit of the Rhodes. It would come in the morning and, to avoid detection, from the direction of the mines. It would not be heavily guarded. The guns were to be the final part of a plan for a devastating assault on the Picassos. Iron Rhodes and his top men would be personally taking possession of the supply.
What neither Fenimore nor Iron Rhodes added was that the supply was a decoy, that the area would be saturated with every gunman the Rhodes could send, and that as soon as the Picassos converged on the supply wagon, these Rhodesmen would rise from their hiding spots, open fire and massacre every last Picasso into a mountain of dead, Catholic Mexicans.
Exactly two days later, Fenimore descended the stairs of the Rhodes fortress leading to the dungeons, unlocked and opened the door to the spying room and put a hood on the Picasso’s head. He led the hooded prisoner up the stairs, through the main doors of the fortress and out through the gate. He then rode with him to the town square, where, under the statue of Rafael Rodriguez, he dismounted, pushed the Picasso to the ground, took off his hood and said, “Justice Iron Rhodes has released you as a sign of goodwill and peace. Let that be your message.”
The act must have been convincing because the Picasso didn’t try to wink this time. Instead, he jumped to his feet and ran, sober as you like, straight down the Picasso street along which he’d first drunkenly come.
When that was done, Fenimore rode his horse to the Sugarcane.
He entered by the front entrance, told Olivia tending bar he needed to see the Widow Rodriguez and, when they were alone upstairs, said, “May twenty-fifth.”
Her expression was blank. “Yes, it’s a day like any other.”
“It’s the day of the big gundown.”
‘How,” she began to ask—but her blankness turned to dumbness and she didn’t finish the question.
“A man rides into town and plays three sides.”
“You’re playing my side.”
“Yes.”
“May twenty-fifth.” She intoned the date as if it held a special significance that she couldn’t grasp, before shrugging. “Soon, but I suppose every day is as good as the next, for violence. Alert the miners.”
“How?”
She handed him a blank sheet of paper. “As before. The guns, which you so kindly acquired, shall be ready in two barrels at the entrance to the mine. I trust you will find a way to open the doors and deal with any distractions. If not, you will die. Oh, and I rather enjoyed the tone of your last correspondence. Please keep the doomsday poetry.”
“Do you want me to sign your name?”
“That won’t be necessary. I will make my own presence felt.”
With that, Fenimore took the paper and, seated on the front steps of The Olympus, wrote:
May 25 is Judgment Day. Your immediate salvation is already in your hands. The Gate of Heaven shall be opened for you. You will find the arms of the Redeemer in twin barrels. Arm yourselves and continue on the road to Hope Springs. You will come upon The Apocalypse. The blood of your oppressors shall flow like wine. Drink until your thirst is quenched.
Sincerely,
Your Fellow Conspirator
He mounted his horse and rode to the red rock that covered the mine delivery hole. He slid the rock aside and dropped the message in. It hit bottom as audibly as always. He imagined dozens of dirty men reading his words…
At least they were no longer driving their pickaxes into his brain.
Rather than return to town, Fenimore rode the long way around until he arrived at The Starman’s cabin.
He tied his horse and knocked on the door.
A hole appeared. A rifle poked itself out of the hole.
“Fenimore.”
The door opened and The Starman jumped back and lifted his rifle, before lowering it again. “My goddamn apologies. I still ain’t used to not wanting to murder them grey colours, cocksucker.”
Fenimore walked inside. The fire was out. The aroma of bitter coffee lingered in the air. Various parts of Fenimore’s timepiece were scattered about one of the tables. The door to the small bedroom was open—Fenimore crooked his neck to look inside—and the room was empty.
“He’s gone,” The Starman said. “Packed his things with his face still busted and gone’d himself not long after you left talkin’ about the whereabouts of the mine and some deep cocksucker hole.”
“I need your help,” Fenimore said.
“And I need to hold my tongue with pincers to keep it from flopping out of my mouth like a dead toad, being surprised you ain’t dead yet, with all I been hearing happening in Hope Springs.”
The Starman poured Fenimore a cup of coffee.
It was cold but punchy.
Fenimore exhaled its black, caffeinated bitterness into the world.
“The feud ends soon.”
The Starman lifted an eyebrow. “There’s know facts and know believes, and I know you know goddamn believe it, but you ain’t the first cocksucker to be makin’ prophecies like that.”
“May twenty-fifth.”
“That’s a definite date.”
“I need your help.”
“Ain’t interested and my advisement to you is don’t be interested, neither. Whatever or whoever will be doin’ or dyin’ that date, you be far away.”
“I’m afraid that’s my payday.”
The Starman poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it in one gulp. “And who’s the cocksucker be payin’ ya?”
“I’ll be paying myself.”
“Hoo hoo hoo!” The Starman said, and Fenimore was glad the hootin’ gun was outside. “In case of which my question is from whose purse or in which pocket you in, Picasso or Rhodes?”
“I’ll be paying myself from the purses of both.”
A trail of coffee escaped from the corner of The Starman‘s mouth and disappeared into the jungle of his whiskers, and Fenimore imagined what The Starman’s life would have looked like with Katie O’Rourke: clean shaven, less bitter coffee, more love, laughter, family, the pleasure, as opposed to the inevitability, of losing teeth and growing old.
“The help I need—how would you like to kill a pair of Rhodes?”
The Starman’s eyes lit up at the prospect. Then he looked down at the table. “Goddamn, though, I ain’t stupid. That means the Picassos win, and hate as I do with the bottom of my heart the Rhodeses, the Picassos ain’t no better even if they not done me an equal amount of direct harm. Cocksuckers, all of ‘em.”
“The Picassos don’t win,” Fenimore said. “They lose. They both lose, the Rhodes and the Picasso. Everybody loses.”
“Except you.”
“Except us.”
“I already done played my cards.”
“On May twenty-fifth, I’m going to deal another hand.”
“And how do you reckon you’ll do that, without control of the goddamn deck?”
“The Widow Rodriguez,” said Fenimore. “The miners.”
“In the least you followed my advice on count of that.”
Fenimore spilled the beans. “On May twenty-fifth, there’s going to be a mock delivery of arms to the Rhodes. That’s what the Picassos think, and that Iron Rhodes himself is going to be there to sign the paperwork.”
“I be listening.”
“And participating. The chainmail you sewed under my poncho—”
“Yeah?”
“Iron Rhodes calls it Rhodesium—”
The Starman laughed. “Thievin’ cunt bastard!”
“He says it stops bullets.”
“It goddamn do.”
“And he thinks the Picassos have it, stole it from him somehow, and have made it into enough armour for most of their men. That makes him scared.”
“Hoo hoo hoo!”
“But the Picassos are scared, too, because they think it’s Iron Rhodes who has the armour. They also think he wants to settle the feud once and for all, and soon.”
The Starman poured himself another cup of coffee, and another for Fenimore. The old man had a soft spot for stories. “Well, go on, go on.”
“So, the Rhodes are running out of guns and Iron Rhodes is scared. He wants to grab his profits and run from Hope Springs. The Picassos, meanwhile, think he’s planning a big gundown. They both think the other has the armour, and now the Picassos believe there’s a shipment of guns heading into Iron Rhodes’ hands…”
“That’d be their chance to knock his head off.”
“That’s what they think. That’s what they’ll try to do.”
“And Iron Rhodes?”
“Iron Rhodes is using the shipment as a decoy to set up an ambush. The Picassos charge in and—”
“Bang-bang-bang.”
“That’s right.”
“But you wait a cocksucker minute. I don’t like that at all. Unless I be kookin’ before my time, you said every one of them bastards loses. The way I see it, Iron Rhodes be the one that won.”
“That’s why I need your help.”
“I still be listening.”
“I need you to release the miners.”
“Release ‘em where?”
“Straight onto the field of battle. The miners will be armed. They’re already angry. Now see the Rhodes shooting the Picassos and the Picassos shooting the Rhodes, and all of them falling dead, and a swarm of angry, armed men joins the fighting.”
“It’ll be chaos.”
“Whoever survives, Rhodes or Picasso, the miners will mop them up.”
“Bullets to the head?”
“Bullets to the head.”
“And what about yer head? You talked payday.”
“My head will be where you see it, on my body, and my body will be in an empty town, loading Rhodes money onto a hearse wagon.”
“And you need my help?”
“Every bad body dead, every last piece of disease burned out, Hope Springs healthy, finally freed—”
“Except yer doing it for money not morals.”
“Kill a man. It matter why?”
“There corn on a cob? Of course, it goddamn matters.”
“Does it matter to his wife, his children?”
The Starman bit his cup.
“If you kill a man’s son, take away his wife,” Fenimore said, “does it matter that you did it in the name of the law? Acts matter. Consequences matter. Motive is best hanged from a tree.”
The Starman removed his teeth from the cup and said, “And you was saying I would get to kill me two Rhodes?”
“Grey and genuine.”
“What’s the help ya need?”
“On May twenty-fifth at dawn, bring your sky glass to the mine entrance. You’ll see two guards. Kill them both. It doesn’t matter how. One will have a key in his coat. Next, use the sky glass to find me near the field of battle. When I give the signal”—Fenimore waved his arms to demonstrate.—“unlock the mine doors with the key and release the miners.”
“That it?”
“That’s it.”
“I’ll do it for the goddamn good of Hope Springs.”
“You’ll do it for revenge.”
The Starman looked down again.
“It doesn’t change the doing,” Fenimore said.
“You know something,” the Starman said without looking up, “I been thinkin’ about you lots since the evening when I didn’t shoot you in your blue poncho ridin’ on my property, special when I get to fiddling with yer father’s timepiece, and I hear you now talking to me about money, and, cocksucker, I tell ya, the why of a doing may be there for nothing but the whistling of wind, but hump me paralysed by rattlesnake venom if I don’t think you be motivated also by the goodness of what it is you be accomplishing.”
“I have arranged for men to die so that I can steal their money.”
The Starman laughed. “Of course.”
Then he looked up and said with tears in his eyes, “But I’ll help you.”
“May twenty-fifth.”
The Starman followed Fenimore outside.
Fenimore lifted himself onto his horse. “After you release the miners, head straight back here.”
“You figure?”
“I’ll be stopping by on my way out of town.”
“If you be thinking what I think yer thinking, I want no goddamn part of it, no split. I ain’t covetous.”
“I meant my timepiece.”
“You’ll get it.”
“In one piece, put together like it was before you took it apart.”
“Fenimore…”
There was worry in The Starman’s voice.
Fenimore turned his horse around. Its nostrils flared into The Starman’s face.
“Cocksucker, I know I got no right to ask of you, but will you tell me the story of you some day?”
“I don’t have a story.”
“You have a past, and past is story. Like in the Bible.” The Starman kicked into the dirt with the toe of his worn boot. “A few evenings ago, man came riding by, real serious and warlike. He got on him a dark coat and a wide brim of his hat made it so I couldn’t see his eyes clearer than I can see yours now. He carried with him two clean guns and questions. The questions, they came with a description, and the description was of you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Said I didn’t know no bastard such described.”
“Thank you.”
“I ain’t tell him nothing out of favour to you,” The Starman said.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“He was an evil man. You ride careful.”
“You be careful, too.”
“Oh, I be careful enough. That timepiece of yer father’s, I tell ya. Cocksucker’s given me tricks and ideas for all my little springs. I gone made me some real good booby traps in and around my homestead.”
Fenimore tipped his hat, turned his back on The Starman and rode faster into Hope Springs than he’d ridden out of it.
He went straight up the stairs of The Olympus.
He fell asleep.
Sometime between late night and early morning, three hard raps on the door woke him up.
He grabbed the hootin’ gun and opened the door a crack.
It was Lola.
“Gringo,” she purred, “we’ve come to speak.”
Ezekiel Picasso was with her. He cleared his throat and cocked his pistol. “Open up or I’ll open you up.”
Keeping hold of the hootin’ gun, Fenimore let both of them inside.
“Did your man talk?”
“He talked about May twenty-fifth,” Lola said.
She was wearing a wide belt. A knife was a tucked behind the belt. Fresh blood stained its blade.
“But whether we believe what he talked remains to be seen,” Ezekiel Picasso said, and peered into all corners of the room to make sure they were alone.
They were.
Standing in the doorframe that led from the bathroom to the bedroom, Ezekiel Picasso took up most of it. He was short and wide and when he walked from the frame to the window and looked out at the square and the statue of Rafael Rodriguez, Fenimore thought that it might just take every last bullet in his criss-crossed ammo belts to take him down—all of him, including the big sombrero and the waxed, curled moustache.
“You know what’s funny, gringo?” Ezekiel Picasso asked.
It wasn’t a question. It was the introduction to a speech: “What’s funny is that I’m no different than I was back in the old days. I don’t do different things, and the things I do, I don’t do them any different. Rafael Rodriguez, he built this town. Everything in it, including me, my family and Iron Rhodes, he started it. But now the stupid people of this idiot town pray to that statue, wanting a return to the good old days of Rafael Rodriguez. They’ve forgotten that the day my father and Iron Rhodes carved up Rafael Rodriguez’ face was a day that changed nothing, just as the day when I—” He spun to face Fenimore. “—carve out Iron Rhodes’ heart will change nothing.”
“May twenty-fifth,” said Lola.
“Who did you carve with that knife?”
“The times, they are too troubled to risk loose lips and witnesses,” Ezekiel Picasso said. “Casualties are unavoidable.”
Fenimore couldn’t decide whether that was a platitude or a threat.
Lola wiped the knife on her dress and slid it back under her belt. “If what our man said is true, and on May twenty-fifth we kill Iron Rhodes and his top men, where do you see yourself, gringo?”
“Paid and gone.”
“Or plotting with Rigoberta Rodriguez.”
“Yes,” Lola said, “we know you’ve been seeing that whore.”
“A man has needs.”
Ezekiel Picasso raised his pistol. “My need is to make sure you disappear after the gunpowder settles.”
That was a threat.
“If you shoot me or lock me up, Iron Rhodes might get spooked,” Fenimore said. “A frightened animal is an unpredictable one.”
“Oh, we don’t want to shoot you,” Lola said.
“My sister speaks for herself. I do want to shoot you,” Ezekiel Picasso said. “I don’t trust you, paid for or not, and I don’t believe two centavos in your word or your greed. But I also don’t want to risk losing the opportunity that your arriving into my town has made for us.”
“So lower your gun.”
The pistol didn’t budge. “Force of habit.”
“What we came here to say, face to face,” Lola said, “is that we’ll be watching you.”
She said it with sting, but Fenimore knew from experience that saying you’d be watching was different than actually watching, and the two were often at odds.
Ezekiel Picasso hissed. “Every breath you take, every stinkin’ gringo move you make.”
To Fenimore, all that meant was that the Picassos were as nervous as the Rhodes. Neither knew what the other was conspiring, or capable of, yet the imaginations of both were coming up with the most violent nightmares.
“That’s all,” Lola said.
“Sleep tight.”
After the Picassos had left, Fenimore walked downstairs to order pails of hot water for his tub, but the hotel-keeper was asleep on his desk. His pillow was his own blood. His throat had been cut. With Fenimore’s cigar between his fingers, he would dream forever—of neither Heaven nor Hell.
Iron Rhodes smacked Fenimore in the chest with a wad of money. The force was equal to the value of last minute loyalty. “Whatever happens today, this is for you.”
Fenimore pocketed the money without counting it.
“One thousand,” Iron Rhodes said.
Fenimore grinned, thinking about the rest of Iron Rhodes’ money that he’d soon have. “Thanks.”
“You will earn it.”
There was something appealing about Iron Rhodes’ calm. Fenimore couldn’t deny it. Even in the face of obliteration, however unknowing, Iron Rhodes still exuded confidence, still made you want to take up your weapon and follow him into war. He truly did have the authority of a judge. This despite that Iron Rhodes had no intention of doing that warring himself. As Fenimore knew, Iron Rhodes’ plan was to run: to leave his men as decoys, take his valuables and flee across the landscape to riper plundering ground.
He patted Fenimore on the shoulder and went off to offer final instructions to the dozens of other armed, grey-clad men lingering in the hills, weeds and cactuses of the area just beyond the entrance to the mine.
The mine’s workers had already been led inside. To them, it was to be another regular workday. Little did Iron Rhodes or his loyal soldiers know that the workers were enlightened, that the barrels containing the Widow Rodriguez’ guns already stood inconspicuously by the entrance, and that The Starman with his vengeance and sky glass was waiting less than a mile away, ready to fire two shots, click open one lock, and unleash havoc.
At least Fenimore’s horse seemed to sense the potential for destruction. As Fenimore rubbed its chest, his fingers felt tight, knotted muscles.
Fenimore’s own chest was rising and falling slowly, stuck to his shirt by a mixture of heavy mist and sweat. May twenty-fifth, the day of the gundown, had dawned humid, on storm clouds but no rain. Instead of a downpour and war drums, the continent of America offered only the distant sound of rolling thunder.
In their own way, they looked impressive—the Rhodesmen.
There was something romantic about the way their bodies swam through the atmosphere, above the frayed, sickly yellow plants that sprouted from between the cracked earth and rocks in this inhospitable place. Fenimore wondered how Iron Rhodes had gathered them. Some must have come with him. Perhaps others were the sons of old comrades. And the remainder? Strangers like himself, who’d wandered into his grasp and been enticed to stay by the power vested in them in the name of law. The ones who only pretended, those Fenimore could understand. They were opportunists. But those who sincerely believed in the justice they’d been told they meted out, they remained a mystery. Believers in cities of law, cities of God, cities of women…
“Messrs Rhodes!”
The Justice was calling his troops.
The troops listened. They gathered around him, guns held ready and faces serious.
And he proceeded to weave a rousing speech about law and righteousness and how civilisation would crumble in the hands of the Picassos, lawless men whose only goal was their own pleasure. Because unlike the dark-skinned savages, they, the Rhodes, were for order, which meant they were for the people. They were the people. They, the Rhodes, were for the people’s equality and for fairness and for the guarantee of rights to all citizens. They, the Rhodes, would fight valiantly and bravely, and then Fenimore stopped listening, and then Iron Rhodes commanded his men to scatter and lie prone in the prickly brush, waiting for the wagon carrying the false arms supply to appear and for the Picassos to attack and then to rise as one united fist and smash the Picassos into oblivion.
Like by magic, the troops dispersed and disappeared.
Fenimore got on his horse and followed Iron Rhodes and several others, including the men in the bespoke suits, to a safe vantage point behind a hill.
“And now, Messrs Rhodes,” Iron Rhodes said, “we wait.”
Fenimore took out a cigar.
The men in the bespoke suits opened a new bottle of brandy and poured each other two full glasses.
The mist got thinner. The sun rose higher. The clouds grew darker. The thunder became a roar.
And it started to hail—big balls of ice that made Fenimore glad he was wearing his hat and that clanged off the empty bottle of brandy before melting into the hot summer air.
Through a haze of ice and shimmering heat, the supply wagon appeared.
There was a roll of thunder.
The thunder was followed by a barrage of gunshots.
A stray bullet exploded a falling ball of hail, whose icy fragments dropped into the glass of brandy held by one of the men in the bespoke suits. His soft hand started to shake.
Iron Rhodes raised his rifle and shot in the general direction of the wagon; or rather behind it, where, wearing a cloud of dust as a fluttering cape, arose a mass of horses, clashing colours and bobbing sombreros. It sounded like a kettle of Spanish insults and pounding hooves.
Iron Rhodes took another shot.
The Rhodesmen lying in wait in the surrounding brush remained hidden.
The wagon neared, followed ever more closely by the chasing band of Picassos. There were a lot of them. More than a hundred. More than two hundred.
When the wagon was flush within the pincers of the trap, its rider suddenly yanked—and pulled its horses to a skidding stop that set the wagon facing the Picassos sideways.
They kept coming.
The rider jumped off the wagon, and scurried to safety behind it.
The Picassos came closer and closer…
When they were close enough—
“Now!”
The hiding Rhodesmen rose and, within the blink of an eye, opened a sea of piercing fire.
Dozens of Picassos fell, their horses rising up, carrying the bodies of dead men.
The Rhodesmen kept firing.
More Picassos fell.
Those that didn’t cursed and shot back and cut perpendicular lines into the brush from where their sworn enemies were squeezing them.
Fenimore glanced back to see the reaction of Iron Rhodes, but the good Justice was already gone: his figure galloping off into the horizon toward Hope Springs.
The men in the bespoke suits cowered against the hill. Their horses, spooked by the thunder and the guns and the hail, had fled.
Fenimore got on his own horse and rode away from the ongoing massacre.
The hail came down hard.
When he was far enough that the screams of dying men were no longer individual, he slipped the hootin’ gun onto his shoulder, turned to face the direction of the mine and made the signal for The Starman to release the miners. He had no doubt that The Starman had accomplished his task. He had even less doubt that the miners had taken care of their own murderous deed.
Minutes later, the miners appeared.
They came from the right, a horde not unlike the Picassos, but silent and sooty black.
Fenimore backed away. He didn’t want to be caught in their path.
Though not on horseback, they moved almost as quickly as had the Picassos—running, fueled by years of pent up submission and rage, finally able to unload themselves on the flesh of their oppressors.
A streak of lightning tore open the sky.
But not even that could stop them. No, Fenimore thought, they were the lightning.
However, before the force of black could meet the battle between the colours and the grey, a figured appeared. Riding, it was but a silhouette against the electric sky. Fenimore’s first thought was that Iron Rhodes had returned. But the figure was too small. The Starman? Too graceful. The figure was a woman. She was the Widow Rodriguez, dressed in all black to match her dirty army, and yelling, “Follow me! I am your fellow conspirator!”
She rode to intercept the miners’ path.
Alone, she faced them. “I have armed you. I have prepared you. I have helped you break free of your shackles. Before you, your enemies kill and maim each other. They weaken each other. Together, we shall exploit their weakness to eradicate them all and create a new Hope Springs!”
The miners stopped.
Although they appeared as a solid black mass of jutting legs, arms and guns, one fragment disattached itself from the rest and strode forward.
He was broad shouldered and tall. He was the leader.
“You are Rigoberta Rodriguez,” he said, “wife of Rafael Rodriguez, founder of the town of Hope Springs.”
“Yes!”
“And these are your guns we hold. And you are the fellow conspirator who has planned, prepared and made possible our salvation.”
“Yes!”
“We thank you,” said the Leader.
The Widow Rodriguez smiled the first unrehearsed smile Fenimore had seen her smile, full of power-lust and spite.
The Leader lifted the pistol he was holding and shot her in the head.
“Death to the old guard,” he said.
“Long live the new!” the black mass responded.
Fenimore turned his horse and rode after Iron Rhodes to Hope Springs.
Hope Springs was as eerily peaceful as an empty cocoon. Balls of hail pelted the roofs of the Hotel Olympus and the Sugarcane, two businesses that were in need of new proprietors. The grave-maker’s workshop was not. Fenimore dismounted, patted a goodbye to his horse, and entered to the sound of ringing bells.
The grave-maker was busy engraving.
He put down his tools.
“Out back,” he said when he recognised Fenimore. “I emptied her out for you, but mind my embalming fluids.”
Fenimore went out back, where the hearse and its three horses stood clean and ready.
He didn’t waste time. He rode the hearse to the statue of Rafael Rodriguez, turned right and rode down the empty Rhodes street all the way to the Rhodes fortress. Ghost towns always made his stomach uneasy. Not a soul moved, not even the notary.
The gate in the wall surrounding the Rhodes fortress was closed.
“Antoninus Pius,” Fenimore yelled.
The gate didn’t open.
There was nobody guarding the top of the wall. Goggles didn’t peek over.
“Mr Rhodes!”
Still, the gate didn’t open.
Fenimore wondered where Iron Rhodes was.
“Justice Rhodes!”
When no voice answered, Fenimore started walking along the outside of the wall, remembering that Pablito Picasso had somehow gotten inside the compound and he certainly hadn’t done it by walking in through the gate. But the wall was tall and solid all around. Eventually, Fenimore scooped up a rock from the ground and threw it at the building inside.
The rock crashed through a window.
Someone shot a gun.
“Who goes there!” Goggles blurted out from inside. His frightened stammer was unmistakable.
“Mr Rhodes.”
Fenimore walked to the gate, where the hearse already stood. “I have got Justice Rhodes. He has been injured. He needs immediate medical attention.”
Goggles peeked out over the wall.
“Where is he?”
Fenimore motioned at the hearse—Goggles peeked out further, his mouth agape. “But he’s not gone, just shot up.”
Goggles opened the gate.
Fenimore leapt onto the hearse and drove it inside.
Goggles ran forward to look.
Fenimore hit him in the back of the head with the butt of the hootin’ gun. He collapsed. Fenimore pressed two fingers to his neck. But he was still alive.
As he went through Goggles’ pockets, Fenimore tried to understand why Iron Rhodes would entrust such delicate work as retreat to as numb a skull as Goggles. None of his answers made sense, but that was soon made irrelevant: Fenimore’s fingers felt a steel rod. Although all of his father’s sound locks had a bypass that Fenimore knew only too well, that wouldn’t be necessary.
He put the rod into his own pocket, tied Goggles wrists together and to the hearse, and with one powerful kick sent the front doors of the Rhodes fortress slamming to the floor.
He turned right and tapped on the appropriate vertical bar with the steel rod.
The vault opened.
Fenimore rounded the first corner, the second, and found himself:
The room wasn’t big, but it was stuffed, wall to wall, with white linen bags. The bags had no markings and were tied together with leather straps. Fenimore put down the hootin’ gun, kneeled and undid one of the straps. The bag was filled with paper money, but it was currency he didn’t recognise. He tried the next bag over. That one held bank notes. He tried another bag: crisp, green American dollars. Master Taki would have been proud.
Fenimore slung the hootin’ gun over his shoulder, picked up five bags like quintuplets and made outside with them.
The gate loomed open, saying, “Take your winnings and walk away.”
Goggles stirred, tried to stand, and found himself jerked back to the dirt by his bound wrists. He looked at Fenimore holding the bags of Iron Rhodes’ money and slurred, “Father’s going to kill you.”
So that was the answer.
Fenimore tossed the five bags into the hearse.
“Father is.”
He rifle-butted Goggles to sleep again.
When he stepped through the busted down doors and stood in the lobby of the Rhodes fortress, thoughts of The Starman prevented him from going straight to the vault. Following these thoughts, he went forward and pushed open the heavy doors of Iron Rhodes’ steel study.
He met Katie O’Rourke‘s Irish eyes beaming dreamily in vivid red and green from her portrait perch above Iron Rhodes’ desk. If The Starman wouldn’t accept money, Fenimore thought, perhaps he would accept this. He would return the woman to her rightful place.
Pulling down the portrait, Fenimore couldn’t imagine how The Starman could still love someone who’d betrayed him—he knew the one whose name he wouldn’t remember wouldn’t be so lucky—but decided it wasn’t his to understand. The latter made Fenimore forget that he was doing The Starman a pure kindness.
Pulling down the portrait, Fenimore also revealed a safe.
How comically predictable. Master Taki was probably laughing to himself from the bookshelf.
Fenimore set Katie O’Rourke’s portrait face down on Iron Rhodes’ desk and ran his fingers across the front of the safe, around its knob and down the lines where the safe met the wall. He recognised the make and model immediately. It was a customised Holland Seven: old technology, fairly new acid protection system, categorised “mediocre, upper quadrant” in cracking difficulty by Master Taki. By a trained hand, it was crackable by sound alone. Fenimore had done safes like these at fourteen.
He climbed onto the desk, closed his eyes, and placed his ear against the metal.
The sound of blood rushing through his veins was deafening.
He ripped his ear away.
He calmed himself and tried again.
This time was better. The blood swished and pumped, but the sound was managable. As he twisted the safe’s knob, he heard what he needed to hear.
In the darkness behind shut eyelids the jangle, spin and rattle of the locking mechanism were rays of light that—
Click.
He spun the knob the other way.
—pierced the darkness.
No, that wasn’t right. They were sounds, but visible ones. They were a blind man knocking knees into furniture, creating a painful mental map of an unknown room.
Click.
He was an engineer bat speeding through a mechanical forest of metal grids and rotating gears, avoiding splattering his brains, flying toward…
Click.
Fenimore opened his eyes.
He pulled open the unlocked door of the safe.
He reached inside and pulled out a thin packet of papers: equations, numbers, plans, names, the hard end of a revolver pressing into the back of his skull.
“Drop it.”
The packet hit the floor.
“Hands up.”
Fenimore felt the hootin’ gun being slid off his shoulder.
“Turn around.”
As he did, the revolver travelled the equator of his head until it was in the space between his nose and lips and Lola’s were moving, saying, “Now put it in your mouth, gringo.”
Fenimore bit down on the barrel.
“I told you I’d be watching,” Lola said. “And now I’ve uncovered your deceitful little trick.”
Fenimore didn’t say anything, but with the revolver between his teeth and Lola’s pretty finger on the trigger, for the first time in his life he pissed himself. The urine soaked into his pants and flowed down his leg.
Lola ran the pretty fingers of her other hand up Fenimore’s thigh and squeezed his wet crotch. “Put something in his mouth and he gets all wet. No wonder you never liked me.”
She blew him a kiss.
Fenimore squeezed his eyes closed.
Lola squeezed, too. “It’s not nice to lead a girl on, to pretend you’re a gunslinger when, really, you’re nothing but a thief. Get a girl’s hopes up only to crush them and she might get it into her head that she should paint the walls with your ideas.”
So, this was what kindness got you.
“Lack of attention!”
Master Taki smacked him in the shin with a bamboo smacking stick.
“Always attend fully, but never to the lock. The lock doesn’t change. The environment changes. Change is danger.”
His shin suffered again.
“Lack of attention!”
Lola pulled back the hammer of her revolver.
“Goodbye, thief.”
The gun fired.
The bullet tore through the side of Lola’s supple neck.
Fenimore ripped open his sweating eyes.
Lola pivoted ninety degrees.
The wall was the colour of Katie O’Rourke’s hair. The gaping wound in Lola’s neck sucked at the air. She raised her revolver—but no longer at Fenimore.
Sack-head’s second shot spun her a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
His third made her dead.
“I’ve been watching you, too,” Sack-head said. “You can put your hands down.”
He was wearing a sack again, but it wasn’t the same one. This sack was clean, new, and there were three holes cut crudely into it: two for the eyes and one for the mouth. The voice that emerged from the mouth hole was also less swollen than Fenimore remembered. He actually understood what it was saying.
Fenimore got off his knees on the desk and picked up the hootin’ gun, then the packet of papers he’d gotten from the safe.
“Why?” Fenimore asked.
“You saved my life, I saved yours,” Sack-head said.
“How much?”
Sack-head laughed a swollen laugh. “Half.”
“Let’s load up the money.”
Together, they carried Iron Rhodes moneybags from the vault to the hearse wagon outside. They didn’t talk. They didn’t count. They just picked up, walked and tossed.
Goggles, whom Fenimore had left tied to the hearse but breathing, wasn’t breathing anymore. Fenimore didn’t ask whether the cause was Sack-head or Lola. The sins of the father, he conceded.
When they’d loaded the last bag, they got on the front of the wagon and rode toward the town square.
In the square they slowed. Fenimore looked left, Sack-head looked ahead. Fenimore looked ahead, too. The Picasso street was as deserted as the Rhodes, and beckoned with the prospect of both more wealth and revenge. Twenty minutes, Fenimore told himself. If he couldn’t find the Picasso treasure in twenty minutes, they would leave. Sack-head exhaled, puffing out his sack at the nose. It could have used a fourth hole.
They rode on.
A lone horse was tied outside the casa Picasso.
Fenimore recognised it. “Iron Rhodes.”
Sack-head stretched his neck.
They readied their guns and slipped quietly inside through a glassless window.
The interior looked bizarre to Fenimore without Picasso gunslingers lounging about, like an oil painting with the human figures scratched out by a cat. He and Sack-head proceeded through it carefully. The only sounds, muffled cries and short, bassy sentences, came from deeper within—a place Fenimore recognised as Ignacio Picasso’s room.
They stopped at the open door.
“Where is your God now?” Iron Rhodes was saying.
He had sliced open the layers of mesh above Ignacio Picasso’s bed and was sitting beside the old man, gently rearranging his innards with the sharp end of a knife. There was a purple line around Ignacio Picasso’s neck and a severed finger in his mouth, into which he was making his muffled cries of pain.
Iron Rhodes leaned on the knife.
Ignacio Picasso’s sheets turned a darker shade of pink.
“Pray, you subservient dog.”
Ignacio Picasso spit out the finger and screamed out a batch of green slime.
“Bark!”
Sack-head did—
But before Iron Rhodes had even the time to realise the sound had come from between the wrong set of lips, Sack-head had already sprinted across the room and launched himself, head first, across the bed.
His shoulder caught Iron Rhodes in the jaw.
They tumbled together to the floor.
Sack-head landed on top. Without hesitating, he lifted his elbow and brought it down on the bridge of Iron Rhodes’ nose, making a handsome face unnaturally crooked.
Fenimore stepped into the room and pointed the hootin’ gun at Ignacio Picasso.
Sack-head stuck his thumb into Iron Rhodes’ eye.
When Ignacio Picasso didn’t react, Fenimore shifted his gun’s attention to Iron Rhodes, who, bellowing, grabbed Sack-head by the arms and tossed him aside like an ugly rag doll.
Sack-head slammed against the wall.
Fenimore kept Iron Rhodes pinned to the floor with the hootin’ gun.
“Heathen swine,” Ignacio Picasso coughed.
“Shut up,” Fenimore said.
Sack-head wheezed a few times.
There was no shock or surprise on Iron Rhodes’ face. “How much more did they pay you?” he asked.
“Don’t,” Sack-head said.
They couldn’t afford to waste time. He’d given them twenty minutes. They’d already taken at least five. So, pointing the hootin’ gun at Iron Rhodes’ chest, Fenimore pressed the trigger.
But it was Fenimore who stumbled backward.
Iron Rhodes only grimaced.
The shot had burned a hole through his grey coat, exposing the navy and white fibres of Fenimore’s chainmail poncho beneath. The Rhodesium worked.
Bellowing, Iron Rhodes rose to his feet and stretched out his massive arms.
Fenimore aimed from his knees.
Sack-head did one better: he aimed at the knees.
First the left, then the right—Iron Rhodes wasn’t wearing Rhodesium on his legs—ate a bullet.
Sack-head reloaded.
Without his knees, the giant paragon of law order swayed, yelped, and fell onto his already broken nose.
Sack-head walked forward and stomped on one of Iron Rhodes’ wounded legs.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “it is time for a redemption.”
“Perro,” Ignacio spat.
Iron Rhodes writhed on the floor.
“The man you see slithering before you,” Sack-head said, “was caught this morning living in riches and luxury while the citizens of his lawful town tolled in the black hell below.”
He put the barrel of his gun on the belt around Iron Rhodes’ pants.
“For years, he used intimidation and abused the law to make them live in constant fear—”
He fired. The belt split in two. Iron Rhodes’ body arched.
“—of his perverted sense of justice.”
Fenimore remembered the woman selling forks in the town square.
Sack-head grabbed Iron Rhodes’ pants and pulled them down, exposing his ass.
“The only punishment for these crimes is death.”
He aimed between Iron Rhodes’ legs.
“Is there anyone who, in the name of mercy for this criminal, will take punishment upon himself?”
The crowd was silent.
Sack-head fired.
Fenimore flinched, before turning to Ignacio Picasso, whose expression turned from happiness to dread. The knife was still fitted conveniently into his gut.
“Where’s your bastard treasure?”
“Kill me, stranger.”
“The treasure.”
“So that my children may kill you. My Lola, she will break your spine. Such is the natural order of life.”
Fenimore pressed the knife. “Lola’s dead.”
Ignacio Picasso coughed green. His jaws started to shake and his teeth started to clatter into each other.
“Your men, how do you pay them?” Fenimore said.
“Lola…”
“What’s the currency of loyalty?”
Another movement of the knife snapped Ignacio Picasso painfully back to reality. He laughed, clattering: “Permission, stranger. Permission buys loyalty. Permission to rape, to take, to wreck, to use.”
Sack-head slapped him across his hollow cheek.
“Where do you keep your money?”
Fenimore tightened his grip on the knife.
“Si, gringo. Like that. Send me to Heaven.” His protruding eyes rolled back into his head. “Like that, Lola, si, si…”
Sack-head was about to administer another slap when he heard a door open and slam shut.
Fenimore pulled him out of the room.
The sound of the door was followed by the incoming stomp of boots.
Fenimore and Sack-head ducked into an adjacent alcove, filled with decaying fruit, flies and fans, and listened. They kept their guns at the ready.
The boots approached until they were almost beside them, then faded slightly into Ignacio Picasso’s room.
“The bastards! It was a se—”
Ezekiel Picasso cut short his own exclamation. Fenimore wondered what it was that took his breath away: Ignacio Picasso stabbed or Iron Rhodes face down on the floor with his pants pulled down and his cock blown off.
“Papa. The…”
“No, leave it, Lola.”
“Papa, it’s Ezekiel. The gun supply was a set-up. That gringo bastard.”
“Kill him, Lola. Kill me, Lola.”
“Ezekiel.”
“Let me be, my sweet, sweet daughter.”
“We have to take everything. We have to leave. There’s no time. Our men are dead. They’re all dead.”
Ignacio Picasso screamed.
“Papa, don’t make me. Let me help you—”
“You bastard!”
“Get off the bed. Get off!”
“Don’t make me, papa, don’t make me…”
“Lola…”
The sudden gunshot made even Sack-head cringe. But it was also their cue. Fenimore spun out of the alcove until his back was against the wall about two steps from the door to Ignacio Picasso’s room. Sack-head raised his gun, side-stepped until he could see Ezekiel Picasso breaking apart the frame of his late father’s bed, and blasted.
Before the air settled, Fenimore spun again, this time into the room, and announced himself with a rifle blast of his own. It hit the wooden bedframe, helping Ezekiel Picasso with his work.
Fenimore stepped forward through the twirling splinters.
Ignacio Picasso lay dead by the side of the bed, face down just like Iron Rhodes. The knife that had been stuck in his gut had completely pierced his frail, little body and was sticking out of the small of his back.
Ezekiel Picasso, sitting on the floor, bared his teeth and reached for his pistol.
Fenimore shot it out of his hand.
Sack-head shot the sombrero off Ezekiel Picasso’s head.
Underneath, he was bald.
But when Sack-head moved in to finish the job, Fenimore grabbed him by the shoulder. “I let you have Iron Rhodes. This one’s mine.”
He had The Starman’s horse, and to a lesser extent the hotel-keeper, in mind.
As Fenimore tied up Ezekiel Picasso’s ankles and wrists, Sack-head dug around in the ruins of Ignacio Picasso’s bed until he pulled out a book. “That’s all there is.”
He rifled through its pages. As he did, even his mouth hole seemed to fold into a smile. “Of course, sometimes a book is worth a lot more than you’d think. It appears that our dead Picasso thought the best places to keep his money were everywhere other than Hope Springs. Kindly for us, he wrote them all down.”
Ezekiel Picasso was crawling sluggishly forward like a fat caterpillar. Fenimore retrieved his toupee from under his sombrero and slapped it crookedly on his head. That stopped his crawling. “Shoot me like you shot them, gringo,” Ezekiel Picasso said. “Be a man.”
“I’m merciful.”
Sack-head shoved Ignacio Picasso’s book under his arm. He and Fenimore dragged Ezekiel Picasso through the casa Picasso to the hearse wagon outside.
“You cowards! Shoot me dead!” he screamed after they’d pushed him inside.
“What are you going to do with him?”
Fenimore shoved a roll of bills into Ezekiel Picasso’s mouth to shut him up. “Nothing.”
They rode the hearse wagon down the Picasso street. When they reached the town square, they stopped and Fenimore pulled Ezekiel Picasso onto the trampled ground. He fell with a dull thud. Lying on his back, bald, he looked like a newborn baby. When Sack-head wound up and pretended to kick him, he covered up like an overturned beetle.
Fenimore took off his grey Rhodes coat
and tied one sleeve around Ezekiel Picasso’s neck and the other around Rafael Rodriguez’ ankle.
Ezekiel Picasso spit out the roll of bills. “Cowards!”
They waited until he’d yelled himself out, then Fenimore grabbed him by one end of his brilliantly curled moustache and tugged. The intention was to cause pain. Much to his surprise, the moustache came off.
“What in the…” Sack-head said.
Fenimore grabbed Ezekiel Picasso’s shirt and ripped it open, tearing off an entire column of buttons.
Beneath the criss-crossed belts of ammo, where there should have been black hair on a flabby chest, there were instead several wide linen straps holding down two moderately sized breasts.
Ezekiel Picasso snarled.
Sack-head kicked him between the legs.
Ezekiel Picasso snapped forward against the coat holding him back by the neck.
Fenimore looked at Sack-head.
“Nada.”
Fenimore tore off the remaining half of Ezekiel Picasso’s moustache.
“So,” Sack-head said, “what do you want to do with her?”
“Nothing.”
They got on the hearse wagon loaded with money and started it rolling down the street out of town. In their wake, the women and children of Hope Springs crept out of buildings, toward the statue of Rafael Rodriguez. The notary stepped out of his office, put a pistol to his head and blew his brains out all over his windows.
When they passed the grave-maker, Sack-head reached out and shot him in the heart. “Complicit leech.”
After the hearse wagon passed the town sign, Fenimore looked back. Hope Springs looked the same as it had looked before, when he’d first walked into it beside a drunken horse—beside Winnie. Somehow, he had expected it to look different. Iron Rhodes was dead. Ignacio Picasso was dead. Most of the Rhodes and most of the Picassos were dead. The Widow Rodriguez was dead. The miners were free and their families no longer had anyone to fear. Somewhere deep inside, he had expected such a revolutionary change to be accompanied by the unbearable brightness of raging fires and the choking thickness of rising black smoke. Then he stopped thinking about Hope Springs altogether. It wasn’t his town. Whatever happened to it wasn’t his business.
“How are you going to spend your half of the money?” Sack-head asked.
They were in the desert.
Fenimore hadn’t thought about it. When he arrived in Hope Springs, he’d wanted to earn enough money to take a bath, pay a woman for sex, buy food and clothes, and start on his revenge. Most of that he had accomplished, but he had also come into possession of such an excess of riches that the possibilities seemed limited only his imagination, and he prided himself on having a good one. He also prided himself on being a rational thinker. “First,” he said, “we need to decide how to divide up the Picasso treasure book.”
“By pages, I was thinking.”
It was a simple and reasonable solution. “And each can track down his own Picasso hiding places in his own time.”
“Where do you think we should do the dividing?”
“We know a place.”
As they approached The Starman’s cabin, Fenimore saw his burro grazing on the land in front and at any moment expected The Starman to open the cabin door and come out to meet them with coffee and a big smile on his face. Because that didn’t happen, Fenimore knocked on the cabin door and waited for The Starman’s rifle to peek out of its hole in the wall. After it didn’t, he knocked again.
Sack-head had stayed on the hearse. “He in?”
Fenimore shrugged his shoulders and knocked for a third time. This knock was harder. The door creaked open.
Fenimore slid the hootin’ gun off his shoulder and into his hands and stepped inside.
“Cocksucker…”
The Starman’s voice was weak. He was lying on the floor, holding Fenimore’s reconstructed timepiece to his stomach, below which his intestines were spilling out of his body.
Fenimore rushed toward him and fell to his knees.
“I ain’t,” The Starman said. “I ain’t tell that cocksucker…”
Fenimore laid down the hootin’ gun and put his hands on both of The Starman’s grizzled cheeks.
“Tell him what?”
“Evil… came again… lookin’ for ya…”
“What did he look like?
Pain tightened The Starman’s his neck. His intestines throbbed in tune with his heartbeat. He could barely keep his eyes open. Whenever he closed them, Fenimore got up the courage to look at his wound, which kept bathing itself in fresh, glistening blood.
“Melon head… hairs like on a cunt… ain’t have no nose… pig nostrils….”
“Did he carry a cleaver?”
The Starman gasped and nodded.
Butcher Bellicose.
Sack-head walked into the cabin, scanned the scene, and stayed standing by the door. He loaded his gun. “We should get out of here.”
“How long ago, Starman?” Fenimore said.
“Twenty minutes.”
Fenimore felt sweat sliding down his face—big, salty drops of it that came straight out of his eyes. “What did you tell him?”
“Said ain’t know a man such described.”
“And when he cut you?”
“I ain’t no goddamn coward no more. Cocksucker, it hurts!”
Fenimore slapped him hard across the face.
“Did he say where he was going?”
“Gulliver’s…”
“Participle.”
“Got yer timepiece.”
“Keep it.”
“With… full…”
“Ownership property passing.”
“And?”
“Trader’s marks, too.”
The Starman shut his eyes, groaned and smiled. “Fenimore…”
“I’m here.”
“Bastard offered me… money…”
“But you didn’t tell.”
Fenimore’s sweat fell onto The Starman’s face.
“I ain’t no coward no more.”
“No.”
“Fenimore…”
“I’m here, Starman.”
“Tell me your story.”
Fenimore took off his hat and laid it on the floor beside the hootin’ gun. The portrait of Katie O’Rourke was still in the hearse. “There’s a painting in the wagon,” he said to Sack-head. “Bring it.”
“But then we leave.”
“Yeah.”
The cabin door shut.
The Starman gargled out a mouthful of bile. “Your story…”
Fenimore leaned close to The Starman and told it to him. He told it in a few words, starting at the beginning and went on till he came to the present moment: then he stopped.
“So you is a thief fuck…”
“I crack safes.”
The cabin door opened.
“The thievin’ in Samanthaton,” The Starman wheezed, “I heard about it…”
Sack-head handed the portrait of Katie O’Rourke to Fenimore.
“What yeh take…”
“Schematics that belonged to my father.”
“Of…”
“Impossible machines.”
“Constructured from lots of little springs?”
“That’s right.”
The Starman’s breathing got heavy, slowed—and suddenly he ripped open his eyes wide as planets. “Get ‘em back, you cocksucker, ‘cause ain’t no story worth beans don’t have an end.”
Then he went limp and, “Hurts, goddamn,” he said no louder than a wind that doesn’t blow.
Fenimore held out Katie O’Rourke’s portrait to him.
“Take this.”
And in that moment, as The Starman’s thick-knuckled fingers gripped the portrait’s steel frame and his pain-filled eyes recognised the face of his true love, Fenimore picked up the hootin’ gun and killed the only person who’d ever been kind to him for no reason but the goodness of his heart.
“Let’s go,” he said to Sack-head.
“No, I don’t think so. I think I got myself a better idea. How about you drop your gun and don’t turn around.”
Fenimore stared at The Starman’s peaceful deadness.
“I mean it,” Sack-head said. “The gun, fucking drop it to the floor.”
Fenimore dropped it—but not before switching it from short to real short, real cocksucker-go-boom distance. The hootin’ gun hit the floor, and rattled. “I saved your life.”
“And I saved yours. I told you we were even.”
“Is it about the money?”
“It’s always about the money. Now kick the gun over.”
Fenimore kicked the gun with his heel. “Why didn’t you kill me in the desert?”
“But you’ve got it all wrong. I always planned to kill you. That’s what the widow was paying me for. ‘Follow and kill,’ she said.”
“The Widow Rodriguez is dead.”
Fenimore heard Sack-head pick up the hootin’ gun.
“Should I say a prayer?”
“I’m not the one giving orders.”
“You’re funny. What do you think I was doing at the Rhodes place? You were a dead man—until I saw those moneybags in the hearse.”
“The Widow Rodriguez always did talk about fluid loyalties.”
“That’s right, but you’ve still got it wrong.” Sack-head stepped backward toward the cabin door. “Hearing your life story, especially what you might call recent history, has actually saved your life, Fenimore.” The door opened. “You see, your dead friend’s not the only one who heard about Samanthaton. Except I heard about it with bounties. They’re high. And somehow I don’t think the authorities will be sympathetic about your partners cutting you out after the fact.” Sack-head’s voice was coming from the outdoors now. “That said, the bounty for you alive is higher than for you dead, so you wait where you’re standing and don’t come out until I find some rope to keep you honest with.”
“And if I do come out?”
“I’ll have no choice but to take you in dead.” He raised his voice. “I was always going to have all the money. This bounty is just a bonus that means you get to keep your life. Consider it a stroke of luck.”
Luck was for suckers. Fenimore ducked.
He yelled, “Hoo hoo hoo!”
The world—
Boom.
Death was wet. It was lying with your face in the dirt while rain dribbled down the back of your neck. It was the smell of moist burning. It was coarse and long and licking the right side of Fenimore’s head, behind the ear.
Fenimore opened his eyes.
Death looked precisely like his burro.
It licked his nose.
Fenimore rubbed his aching head, which felt like the springs in it had been rearranged.
Half of the burro’s body was missing its fur. It had been singed off.
Around the burro, everything else was smoldering debris: the Starman’s cabin, the hearse wagon. Even the sky looked burnt.
Fenimore got onto legs that hurt and walked.
The hootin’ gun lay on the ground like a hollow, erupted metal husk. One of Sack-head’s hands was still wrapped around it. The hand was blown off at the wrist. The rest of Sack-head was nowhere to be found. He’d been disintegrated by the explosion.
The Starman’s body, still clutching the portrait of Katie O’Rourke, lay on its back about a hundred paces away. Fenimore covered them. The Starman was smiling. Dead men don’t talk, not even nonsense, but if The Starman could talk, “I told you I made me some real good booby traps in and around my homestead,” he would have said.
For a moment, Fenimore considered digging a grave for him. But he hated digging, and he didn’t consider it bad to let the vultures have their meal. There was even a people somewhere who made it a point to feed their dead to the birds. That’s what Master Taki said. Master Taki, Fenimore thought, talked too much.
The hearse wagon was a metal skeleton.
The horses were gone. The linen moneybags were gone. The bills and bank notes inside them were gone. The jugs of the grave-maker’s embalming fluid were knocked over and empty.
All that remained was a single heap of coins: silver pesos.
The rain had cooled them.
Fenimore patted his shirt—remembering the papers he’d stolen from Iron Rhodes’ safe—but he’d put those into his coat, and he’d used his coat to tie Ezekiel Picasso to the statue of Rafael Rodriguez.
His burro brayed.
He kneeled, tucked his shirt into his pants and began loading the pesos in through the neck. The shirt held them well enough.
When he was done, he stood up and imagined Butcher Bellicose.
He imagined him striding across the landscape, semi-translucent, with his cleaver in hand and his pig nostrils flaring. He imagined The Starman ascending to Heaven. In addition to the pesos, he still had Pedro’s seven coins in his pocket. Six grimy ones for the six men who’d taken from him—Constanza, The Slovak, Butcher Bellicose, Tartaro, The Little Pimp, and Ulrich—and the seventh for the woman he’d loved, who’d sold him for a future full of dollars.
Alexandra Sorensen.
But it was Butcher Bellicose who would die first. It was Butcher Bellicose who was in Gulliver’s Participle.
The burro knocked Fenimore’s hand with its head.
Fenimore got onto its back and rubbed its big floppy ears, one furry and one hairless. Both felt equally soft. The burro snorted and, without being told, turned to face the east. Fenimore nudged it in the side with his boot and off they went—slowly, steadily and with Fenimore’s feet nearly dragging along the ground. They must have looked a ridiculous pair in the light rain: a man with a lumpy belly riding a half bald burro. But that didn’t bother Fenimore. He whistled, and wondered what he should call the burro. Then he remembered his father. “You shouldn’t name things,” his father had taught him once after their bitch had given a litter of puppies. “Names create closeness. Closeness encourages emotion. Emotion disrupts thought.”
Fenimore spat.
He named the burro Harvey.