by S. A. Barton
up and seasoning your corn with it, popping the plunger’s ragged rubber out and pouring the blood out the back…
“Bolted when we knocked?” Coffee.
“Seat was still warm when I sat.”
Coffee sighs. “I hate it when they go feral like this, and I hate this sympathetic magic crap. I wish…”
“Wish if you wish, but also do while you’re wishing. We want to know where he is. If I do it we’ll just know where he’s been. Memory doesn’t fit the bill today.”
“Damn.” Coffee seizes the squidgy wood spoon handle and shovels a heap of cold, bloody corn into his mouth. He holds it there for a moment, wrinkling his nose, then chews and swallows. “He’s not more than a block away and moving slow. Either he thinks he’s invisible, or he thinks he’s blending in.”
Chamomile goes through the cupboards. A couple of old plastic bowls in kid colors, a set of half a dozen black stoneware plates, three shot glasses, a set of jelly jar drinking glasses, a coffee cup. He takes down the coffee cup, sets it next to the bowl of bloody corn. Coffee nods reluctantly, and spoons the cup full of the mixture.
“He’s going to take all damn day at the rate he’s going.”
“Better to take our time now than to spook him,” Chamomile says.
Coffee frowns. Easy for you to say, you don’t have to eat this mess goes unsaid with the frown and an eyebrow lift. It’s acknowledged with a microscopic shrug.
It takes all damn day.
Albuquerque is a big place and the quarry wanders slow and ragged. They keep him at the edge of perception, knowing that if they can feel his presence, he can feel them. Without the corn or something like it, that’s all it is—presence. No where. A bite of corn at a time they track him across town. To a bodega, a junkyard, a nip joint with an ugly scarred dog out back; to an AA meeting, a grocery store, a crack house, a church. Finally, out into a withered little canyon behind a truck stop on the edge of town. More of a rut, really, dug down into the rock and earth by the pulses of rain rolling down the side of one of the worn mountains that cup the city. Away from the eyes of humans; free.
“One on each end?” Chamomile asks.
“Yeah.” Coffee hops down into the beginning of the rut. A snake rattles, rears, then falls silent. It emerges from the rut, dips its head at Chamomile, turns ninety degrees and vanishes into the brush. A huge crow emerges after it and wings wide and high, flying out over the rut to its other end where it lets out in a wash of gravel onto the low scrub. Chamomile hums the entire William Tell to himself to mark time, then drops into the rut and starts walking.
They find him in the middle. Even more than people, they are all drawn to symmetry. He’s wiry, stripped down to essentials, sinew standing out and muscles shrunk to hard purposeful knots up against the bone. Eyes sunk down deep and cheekbones high and sharp, not at all like his sleek days well fed from atop pyramids. There’s a fresh part in his hair, laid straight over the new skin covering the gully the tire iron must have left in his skull. He is kneeling. Between his hands, dancing slightly in a breeze that exists only between the dark deep seams of his palms, a slender stalk of deep green. Jutting out, four small ears of grain, single kernels stacked unsteadily one above another, light brown with soft streaks of yellow.
“Even the corn was simpler. In the beginning,” the lean man says, not looking around.
“Junkie hookers, Corn? Coffee asks, and sighs. “Was it really any good? Be honest.”
“Nothing like the old days. A waste of time, really. Except…”
“Except what?” Chamomile.
“Except it did what all good rituals do. Brought back the memories, breathed some color and life into the ghosts in my head. The days when they brought me blood brimming in gourds, in skin sacks, in bowls beaten out of gold, without being asked. Pyramids of heads and buckets of hearts and livers, too. Never could get them to stop doing that. They liked killing too much. Always have, the whole lot of them.
“Remember the old days? Before… oh, so much. Columbus and Cortez and their upstart usurper desert war-god, all those bastards. Constantine and his one-track mind, for that matter. The Glass Altar and all his pantheon of one-size-fits-all ghosts. The Unwatching Watched Watcher, that’s a damned good trick. I had a gig like that, just sitting looking good. If the corn failed they brought me more blood because they thought I was angry. If the corn was good they brought me more blood because they thought I was happy. Somehow it never clicked for them that I just gave them the corn and that was it. I never said I had a damn thing to do with rainfall levels and soil fertility.
“And you two—are you really happy knowing nobody but a few addle-headed granola flakes ever deign to remember more about you than that you once rode the shoulder of a one-eyed ass?”
“Barking up the wrong tree, Corn. Ego is fun, but in the end it’s never what it’s all about,” Coffee says, shaking his head.
“Time passes, things change. You change or you end,” Chamomile says softly. He draws a little leather wallet out of his pocket, opens it. Teases a little silver scissor out on his fingertips, snips it in the air. “Hold still.” He leans over toward Corn.
“Gonna snip my cord, is that it?” Corn’s head comes up sharp. He’s still kneeling in front of the stalk of primitive grain. It has fallen still; Corn’s hands are in his lap now and the breeze that moved between them has died. Now it’s just hot, that southwest mountain hot that waits brittle for the night to come so it can turn to cold. The sun is almost down. The shadows are long.
“It grows back in a decade or two. Just long enough for you to have a good long think about why we don’t screw with the humans anymore.”
The scissors reach out. Corn swivels at the hips like a snake, legs squirting out to the side breakdancer style. Coffee breaks to the side, drawing. His bullets are only lead but they can still be a nuisance and a distraction. Chamomile jumps back. There’s a little dinged-up derringer in Corn’s fist, over-under barrels hardly long enough to peek out from under his thumb. It pops and there’s a spark in the air like a firefly over Chamomile’s head, gone in a flash.
Corn leaps straight up, ten feet, maybe twelve. He grabs the lip of the little canyon and heaves himself over, gravel clattering in his wake. Surely he’s shredded the leg muscles of his human body doing it, but it won’t be hard to fix on the fly. Coffee doesn’t fire. For the split second it might make a difference, he’s distracted. Chamomile pops like a soap bubble, leaving his cop suit crumpling to the ground like a shed skin.
“Son of a bitch,” Coffee says to the puddle of clothes, the empty shoes. He leans down and picks the little scissors out of the dust. In the old days, when it was all swords and axes—when people fought at the drop of a hat and looted and pillaged for fun—the attention was focused. It wasn’t easy to lose the thread. But now—it was talk and smiles and only rarely a burst of sudden violence, like a lightning bolt from a clear sky. People hid the violence now, until the last instant of action. Even we have fallen into the pattern, Coffee thinks. Then he holsters his gun and a moment later black wings throw themselves into the setting sun after their prey.
From above at dusk, the mountainside crenellations and scrub form a wrinkles-on-wrinklescape of dark and darker; nothing is without shadow.
A thousand years ago it would have been a silver dagger in his sleeve, the crow thinks as he flies. I blame the age to avoid blaming myself. We’ve both grown soft.
The regret, understood, is dropped. You have to learn to drop them at a certain point, or you drown in them; the crow has learned enough to appreciate that. The wings circle under the emerging stars. How will he run is the only question; only his presence can be felt. The cup and the corn and the blood are fallen to the dirt, behind in the gulch.
Behind in the gulch. Of course. The crow drops out of the sky into the shadows of the earth. A coyote calls in the distance, yip, yip, yoooooooooo. There’s n
o moon. A scant skin of dew gathers out of the dry air as more of the night passes. A shadow lengthens an inch at a time and gathers the cup in its arms.
The crow lengthens much faster from his own shadow, silver scissors flashing out of the feathers as they fall away to uncover fingers.
“Yip!” says the Corn God, and the tiny blades close on a spark. The dirty junkie rags fall empty to the dirt. In the quiet, they sigh as they fall.
Coffee stands alone, tucks the scissors back into the wallet, the wallet back into his pocket. He walks up out of the gulch toward the truck stop. He’s tired too.
But he has miles to go before he sleeps, and not even he knows their number.
See more from S. A. Barton on his blog at https://sabarton.com
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