by Merl Fluin
The world was ruby red and azure. Red rocks, red earth, red heart, red blood, blue sky, blue coat, red coat, blue gloves, red lips. Saguaro reached for the sun, fleshy red fruit erupting from their tips, rough low vegetation clustering at the base, shrubs punctuating the spaces between. Cantos warned TJ to stay away from the cacti and take care not to get herself or the pony caught on the spines. He said they were tough to remove if they entered your flesh.
Late in the forenoon they reached a spring and stopped to rest and water the horses. The water bubbled up from the foot of a rock and pooled in a shallow basin. The basin was shaded by rocks and surrounded by blazing yellow flowers with hairy stems and prominent organs. The rocks were marked with carvings: geometric shapes, interlocking circles and spirals, pentagrams and pentagons arranged in stars and rings.
TJ removed her hat and gloves to bathe her hands and face. She scooped water into her left palm and poured it carefully over the closed eye on the back of her right thumb. A black crested bird landed beside her, its head cocked, making a sound like splashing water.
Cantos was standing beside his horse and squinting into the sky. His red and blue topcoat was dusty.
“You think we’re far enough away to stop for a while now, figure out which way we really need to head?”
He crouched in the shade beside her and refilled his canteen from the spring. “We may have a problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Can you fly?”
“I’m not finding this funny.”
“Neither am I. That smoke was the Two Slits burning down.”
Her hands stopped moving in the water. She rocked back and sat on her heels. “How can you possibly know what the hell that fire was?”
“I saw it,” he said.
“From that far away? All we could see was the smoke.”
“Not then. I saw it a half hour or so ago. The fire was almost out, but there’s not much of the building left. Lot of people standing around in the street wondering what they’re going to do next. It’s what I’m wondering too.”
“What are you talking about? How did you see this?”
“I flew over the town to take a look.”
Her hands started moving in the water again, turning over and over each other. Her eyes darted to the pony, then to her saddlebags, then back to the spring, then at her own feet.
The black bird hopped nearer and waited.
“By all means go ahead, but I may as well warn you that I have already drawn,” said Cantos.
He was back on his feet and holding his six-gun in his six-fingered hand.
“I won’t shoot you unless I have to,” he said, “but I will take that pony and leave you here to die if you try to shoot me. Take off your boot and empty it out.”
The bird made a sound like a cocking safety.
TJ did as she was told, removing her left boot and tipping it until a derringer fell onto the ground. Cantos picked it up and tucked it into his money pouch.
“You’re fit, agile and strong,” he said, “and if it came to a physical fight it would not surprise me to receive quite a boxing from you, for all your smallness. But I have brains as well as bullets, and I won’t say which is likely to prove the more deadly.”
TJ took a breath that wobbled like heat haze. “All right. You have my hundred dollars, and I guess that’s what you were after all along. I daresay it was more fun and more lucrative that your usual cup-and-balls routine. But for god’s sake, leave me the pony.”
He stood up, walked to the pony, and opened one of her saddlebags. He pulled out a canteen, a money pouch, a pair of vaulting shoes, and a hand mirror that he quickly pushed back inside the bag.
“Stop that!” She jumped to her feet.
“Just augmenting my trust.”
He continued to rummage in the saddlebag, then moved around to inspect the contents of the bag on the other side.
“Take down your bedroll and spread it on the ground,” he instructed. The gun glinted with bright red reflections from the massive rocks around them.
She spread out the bedroll. Coiled inside it were two changes of clothes, her circus skins, a golden wand, a long bowie knife, and a war bag containing ammunition for the derringer. Cantos picked up the bowie and inspected it before tucking it into his own bedroll.
“And now I think we had better lie down on your bed,” he said.
TJ lay down with stiff limbs. He walked twice around the perimeter of the bed, never taking his eyes off her. Then he lay beside her, propped himself on one elbow with his back towards her, took a notebook and pencil out of his pocket, opened the book and began to make marks on the page.
They lay there in silence for a long while. The black bird watched them from the horn of Cantos’s saddle. TJ pushed all the air out of her lungs and sat upright.
He spoke without glancing up from his notebook.
“Tush, child, I’m not stealing your pony, or your money, or your virtue either, whatever that means. I just don’t want you pointing that dainty delight of a derringer into my face. We’ll find your Cowhead, I swear it, but we have to trust each other a little. And since the fact that I can do things that you can’t do is the whole reason you paid me the money in the first place, you have to stop jumping like a frog every time I tell you something you don’t already know.”
In two strides she was across the ground and on his mare, holding the reins in one hand and unsheathing the bowie from his bedroll with the other. She gave a yell and cantered in the direction they had come.
Rocks and scrub parted before the mare’s hooves, opening a roadway straight towards town. Urging the mare to a gallop, she rode for perhaps fifteen minutes.
Then she pulled the horse to a halt and was stock still for many heartbeats before she turned around and cantered back to the spring.
Cantos was exactly as she had left him. She dismounted, picked up her gloves from the water’s edge, pulled them on, and sat down in her place on the bedroll beside him. The bowie was in her hand.
“Rest now,” he told her, putting the notebook and pencil into his pocket and getting to his feet. “We’ll move on after the worst of the noonday heat has passed. I’ll take the direction.”
He walked to the tallest of the rock formations that cast shade over the spring. “Don’t go to sleep,” he called as he disappeared behind it.
The bird settled on the horn of the saddle. Red rocks, red earth, red heart, red blood, blue sky, blue sky, red rocks, blue gloves, red lips, blue eyes, red hands. She lay the knife alongside her, pulled her hat over her face, stretched out and closed her eyes.
When she opened them again she was lying in full sunlight, and Cantos was untying a nosebag from the pony. The knife was still at her side.
Without a word she got up and reassembled the bedroll. She slipped the bowie knife inside its core, along with her war bag of ammunition.
7.
Sunset was a triumph of earth over sky: everything red, above and below. Tall saguaro and pipe organ cacti threw shapes in deep relief against the dusk, an unknown alphabet written in cursive hand. The fruit at their tips gaped like wet red gory mouths around which clouds of bats clustered and kissed. The desert cold rose, pulled out of the ground by the rising moon.
Cantos gestured with his arm. TJ pulled the pony to a stop while his mare slowed to a walk. He turned to the right and went on into the gloom, his form smudging in the twilight. TJ pulled her coat close about her and made sure of the bedroll behind her saddle.
A few moments later he re-emerged from the shadows. “Company,” he whispered.
“We need to do anything about it?”
“I think so. It would be rash to ignore them unless we’re quite sure they’re ignoring us. As far as I can tell there is only one person, but it may be that they are merely an advance party for others.”
“What would they want with us?”
“TJ, I think you and I both left behind some unpaid debts, unloved women and unpluc
ked thorns in that town. Wait here while I loop around in back of them. Then lead your pony quietly in that direction at my signal. If we creep up from two directions at once we stand a better chance of trapping them and finding out what they want without resorting to gunplay.”
“Give me my derringer.”
He did so, then rode away again.
TJ dismounted and waited until a glossy black bird brushed past her shoulder. Then she walked the way Cantos had taken. The sounds of her progress mingled with the calls of night birds and coyote screams far off in the distance.
A pinprick of light showed in the scrub, increasing to a small campfire. A dark figure huddled beside it. The smell of burning stalks and leaves and tobacco hung in the chill air as TJ approached. She saw the figure turn and stumble to its feet as Cantos stepped out into the firelight, his six-gun aimed at the figure’s head. The figure threw its hands into the air and then dropped them as Cantos put the gun away. He stooped low to light a cigarette, then righted himself and called out. “It’s Little Dove or False Uncle.”
TJ joined them by the fire. The bartender from the Slits was sipping whisky from a flask, which she offered to both of them. They took nips in turn and handed it back to her.
“Are you alone?” asked Cantos.
“Where’s your horse?” asked TJ simultaneously.
Little Dove or False Uncle rubbed her face with her sleeve and took another swallow from the flask.
“Alone,” she said. “No horse. Walked.”
“What happened?”
“Fire. The Slits is gone.”
“Where’s your sister?”
“Don’t know. Gone.”
TJ grabbed both the woman’s hands in her own. “What happened to everyone upstairs?”
“Don’t know. I saw some of them out in the street when I ran out. Guess others were still inside, maybe.” She rubbed her face again.
“Mei-Lin. My friend, you know the one I mean. Was she in the street when you ran out?”
“Don’t know. I don’t think so. Oh, I don’t know.” The woman’s face showed pale where she had rubbed it. TJ let go of her hands and walked quickly away from the fire.
Cantos followed and grabbed her by the shoulder. She pulled out of his grasp, leant over and vomited.
When she had finished, she spat and stood up again. A swarm of insects appeared at her feet.
“Better?”
“Not really.” They returned to the fire.
Little Dove or False Uncle had taken the Winchester from Cantos’s saddle and was aiming it at them. Her eyes glittered in the dying light. “You two want to tell me why you took off right before a fire that destroyed my life?”
“Come along now, you know why. I’m doing a job for Ms Breckenridge. Good lord, it was you who introduced us.”
“That may explain why you left.” She waved the rifle in TJ’s direction. “Don’t explain why she had to leave town with you. What you running from, TJ?”
“I stole some money.”
“Yeah, so I heard. And you set a nice big fire as a distraction while you made your getaway, am I right?”
“Why would I set fire to the place where my friend lived?”
“I didn’t see her there. Maybe she’d left already. Because maybe you told her to clear out before you did it.”
“I swear –” TJ took a step forward. The woman cocked the rifle.
Arms open wide, her hands outspread, TJ took another step.
Little Dove or False Uncle fired a shot into the air. The night cracked with the noise of it. Bats whooped and whirled away. She lowered the rifle and pointed it at Cantos.
Cantos put his arm out, across and in front of TJ.
“Let’s not make trouble for one another,” he said. “Tell us what we can do to help you.”
“I’ll take the pony,” she said. “And this rifle, and your money.”
“It seems you have taken the rifle already.”
“Well, it seems I have. Let’s have the money next.”
“Come and get it.” Cantos held his coat open to reveal the leather pouch hanging from his belt next to the holstered Colt.
Little Dove or False Uncle swivelled the rifle in TJ’s direction, not taking her eyes off Cantos. “I’ll bet she’s got some money.”
“Yes, I’ll bet she has too. You can collect it when you come over here to fetch the pony.”
“Your horse is on this side, Cantos Can, and he’ll do fine, saddlebags and bedroll and all.”
“I don’t think you’re horsewoman enough for that,” said TJ, and clicked her tongue.
The black mare had shied at the sound of the shot and was now far behind Little Dove or False Uncle’s back. Lifting its head at TJ’s signal, it started towards her. Little Dove or False Uncle made a grab for the reins with her trigger hand.
Cantos drew his Colt as the rifle muzzle dipped.
TJ took a flying leap onto the mare’s withers.
Little Dove or False Uncle crammed her foot into the stirrup and tried to haul herself up into the saddle. TJ wrestled with her and knocked her to the ground.
The Winchester jumped out of Little Dove or False Uncle’s grip. It landed a few feet away, firing into the ground as it hit.
Little Dove or False Uncle went sprawling. Cantos stood over her, pointing the Colt at her face. Both were breathing hard.
TJ dismounted and soothed the frightened mare. The campfire sputtered and died. The three humans were suspended in blackness between the red of the sunset and the white of the moonrise. Screams of dogs, insects and birds gushed into the space around them.
“Light, light!” yelled Cantos.
TJ fumbled with her gloves, pulled a box of matches from her skirt pocket and lit a patch of dry scrub at her feet. Little Dove or False Uncle was gone.
Cantos cursed and stamped out the blaze, then gathered a handful of the scrub and placed it on the embers of the campfire to bring it back to life. TJ fed it with dry sticks. The mare was settling down, but there was no sign of the pony.
“Everything I own is on that pony’s back,” said TJ.
“Let’s wait until the moon is higher and we might be able to see it. It won’t have gone far on its own.”
“Unless Little Dove or False Uncle got it after all.”
“At least she left us the whisky.” They each took a long pull on the flask, sitting close together by the kindling fire.
“It doesn’t make any sense, Cantos. You and I have been riding in a straight line for almost twenty-four hours. How can she have walked the same distance in the same time? She must have had a horse and lost it. Either that or she was lying when she said she was alone.”
“Damn it, TJ, I told you not to fall asleep at the spring.”
8.
They did not find the pony.
TJ rode behind Cantos on the black mare, her face pressed between his shoulder blades and her coat pulled high around her ears. The earth spun away beneath them. The moon funnelled cones of light that revealed doglike beasts with corkscrew snouts running alongside them, flying scorpions covered with thick black and yellow fur, animals wearing the masks of other animals on their faces, bears masked as caterpillars, crocodiles masked as horses. A group of deer began to circle, looping in front of them and then in back, goring each other with their antlers and morphing into lions.
Cantos’s voice was lost amid the din. “What?” TJ shouted into his ear.
He leaned back towards her and bawled: “I’m a wolf and tonight is my night to howl. I’ve got two rows of teeth, one for ransacking graveyards and the other for devouring human beings!”
He started to laugh. Lightning flashed somewhere to the right of them.
On they galloped, crowned heads rolling beneath their hooves. Torrential rain poured out of the sky. Rocky sand turned to black mud into which the black mare sank to her knees, but the world kept rolling past them. The water hit with the force of a cannonade, ripping open Cantos’s coat. The fabric slid
between his back and TJ’s breasts and melted away around the horse’s flanks. The tattoos on his back shone in the water like life flashing in a dark river. Rain battered the sunflowers and forced the heads to rotate, spun by pushing raindrops and pulling gravity, above and below. As the rotations quickened, the spirals of seeds expanded, stretching out waving arms of colour, faster and faster until they floated free of his skin and hovered above the horse’s head, pulsing red and blue in the black air. The spiral shell in the middle of his back sprouted two eyes, three claws and five legs and began to caper around the horn of the saddle. Cantos caught it in his six-fingered hand, hurled it into the air and shot at it with the Colt. It split into eight identical creatures that burrowed into the earth as they landed, pursued by bolts of lightning that struck the surface as the foaming mud sucked the creatures away.
