Lust Is No Lady

by Michael Avallone

  I smiled at her. “I’m a friend,” I said. “Who did this to you?”

  She didn’t answer. Her eyes were watching my lips as if she wanted to kiss me. I misunderstood.

  “Come on, honey. I just want to help. There are laws about people who do things like this —”

  Now, she wasn’t looking at me. Quickly, she had scrambled forward on her knees, poked a brown finger into the browner earth and hurriedly drew some hard, fast lines. She sat back on her thighs, gestured triumphantly at her handiwork. Her eyeballs were blazing with nearly insane hatred now.

  All I could do was look. The erratically drawn letters in the earth stared up at me asking to be read. I bent closer. Unless I had lost my marbles, she had rendered a rather crude “P” and an even cruder “J.”

  “P J?” I asked, noticing she was watching my mouth again. When she nodded to violently that it seemed her neck would break, I had my first real scoop that she couldn’t speak English. “You can’t talk with me, is that it?”

  She nodded, started to mumble something, then shook her head, shut her eyes and rocked her arms as if she were holding a baby. It was an intriguing pantomime in spite of her condition.

  “Ever since you were a baby.” I nodded to show I understood. I was on my knees now too. I put my face closer and spoke slowly. She ought to understand me even if she didn’t parlay English which was hard to understand. Why she didn’t speak it, I mean.

  “What is P.J.? Is that a ranch? A man?”

  She jerked her head in assent and stood up. She indicated height and width with her arms and by striding around with her hands on her hips. I got a pretty good picture of P.J. But the effort cost her. She suddenly let out a low moan and staggered. She would have fallen but I caught her. With my arm around her waist, I turned her face toward mine so she could see my mouth again. I had the notion she understood my words when she could see my lips move.

  “Look, I must get you to where you can be cared for. Later, we’ll find out about all this, and do something about it too. Where do you live? House?”

  Her head fell against my shoulder. For a second, I thought she had fainted. But her proud face came back up and the lovely black eyes with the sun-burned whites showing, looked toward the west. I looked too, but all I could see were those damn prairies and endless miles of grass.

  “How far?”

  She held up three brown fingers.

  “Miles?” It was a fast guess.

  She nodded eagerly, glad I’d understood.

  I shrugged. Distances are deceiving in open country. Maybe the grass ended sooner than it looked. An old limerick spring to my mind. There once was an Indian maid who said she wasn’t afraid —

  I found myself wondering just what my new acquaintance was. Mexican half-breed or pure Cheyenne or Sioux or what? Dimly I remembered some of the tribes and where they were situated in the states. Of course, they had all but vanished like the buffalo.

  But somebody had remembered an Indian bad enough to want to kill her. Which reminded me of the vultures. I scanned the blue sky. They had shoved off for good.

  I half-held, half-carried her to where she said home was. She wasn’t too heavy. Over her protests, I had made her wear my jacket and fedora. They didn’t cover her too much but they helped. Nudity wasn’t the trouble anyway. It was the blistering, boiling rays of the sun overhead. Her own pigmentation had helped in the ordeal but even an Indian isn’t made for that kind of suntanning.

  Reaction had set in too. She was shivering all over. She might have been shaking like a wet dog but she never let out a whimper.

  We left the rocks and earth mounds behind us and struck off through the flatlands. The grass was low and soft beneath our feet, just beginning to turn green with the first days of summer. It made walking easier. A soft wind seemed to waft across the trackless wastes but that might have been illusion. The sun still beat down as if it wanted to drive us to our knees. I was beginning to feel thirsty. The girl didn’t show anything beyond the condition of her flesh. She was a trooper.

  About four big buttes later, I figured we had come at least two miles. The girl was finding it difficult to breathe. The treatment had taken more out of her than even her Indian mind had suspected. I made her stop at frequent intervals to check herself and draw on some miraculous inner strength to recharge her battery.

  Once during the trip we heard an airplane engine. Far off I could see a tiny silver speck in the blue sky. Because of its altitude and direction of flight, I knew it was an airliner but it brought back memories of the playful Piper with the bricks. It also seemed to remind the girl of something. She stopped and huddled closer to me like a frightened child. Her eyes wouldn’t leave that tiny speck until it was invisible.

  Her eyes appealed to me mutely. It figured. She’d seen planes before. But they held some familiar terror for her.

  “P.J.?” I asked softly, moving my lips distinctly.

  She nodded fiercely, amazement and suspicion showing in her eyes. Amazement that I understood, suspicion that I should guess so readily the reason for her fear.

  P.J. was quite a boy, apparently. My free right hand knotted uncontrollably into a fist.

  We kept on walking. The prairie ended sooner than I’d hoped. The girl made me bear further and further right. All at once the grass beneath our feet merged with brown hard earth. I lost sight of the telegraph poles completely. The hard ground widened, spread out into a valley overlooked by gently sloping hills. I blinked. There was a trail about fifteen feet across, worn and well-used. I saw tire tracks as well as hoof marks. Up ahead, the trail showed a wooden clapboard sign of some kind, poked indifferently at a bend where the trail disappeared around a rising knoll. I looked at the beautiful tortured brown face nestled against my left shoulder.

  “There?”

  Her eyes showed agreement. She mumbled again but it was more like a croak. She looked almost happy. If a sun-dried, beaten, tortured girl can look happy about anything.

  Sight of the sign seemed to give her renewed energy. She started forward, almost pulling me with her in her eagerness to proceed. She stumbled over a clod of earth and dead bush and fell headlong in a sprawl.

  Which probably saved her life for the second time in one day.

  There was the high, clean, unmistakable whine of a rifle going off. Just behind the girl’s body a neat pocket of dirt geysered into the air. Before it even hit the ground again, a booming, bellowing voice roared in the afternoon stillness.

  “Get the hell outa here! No strangers wanted!”

  I saw the sign even as I froze where I stood, my arms automatically reaching for the sky. My eyes took in the legend of the rough, black letters painted on the board:

  WELCOME TO

  AGREEABLE WELLS

  3

  I felt like I was going through Combat Village again for Uncle Sam. But I kept my hands up and waiting, until the guy with the rifle put in an appearance. The girl just hugged the earth where she lay as if she were growing there. I didn’t exactly blame her. It was at least forty feet from her to the sign where the rifle shot had originated. Whoever owned the rifle was a marksman.

  “Well?” the voice boomed again. “Whaddya waitin’ for? Dust!”

  It was time to start making noises like a man. I couldn’t see the unfriendly voice yet but I called out:

  “Look — the girl’s bad off — and my car’s stalled on the highway — we have to rest somewhere —”

  There was a short silence in which the loudest sound was the girl’s hoarse breathing. The sweat on my forehead started a lazy run down into my eyes. But I didn’t make the mistake of moving my hands. The unseen rifleman sounded like the shoot-first-ask-questions-later breed.

  “Look, fellow,” I yelled. “Let’s talk this thing —”

  Suddenly, he came into view alongside the silly sign. I realized he’d been right behind it all the time, concealed by a mass of dead weeds sprouting around its wooden base. He stood up and dwarfed the sign
which barely reached his belt buckle. I got a flash picture of a battered ten-gallon hat, blue denims, faded jacket and pants to match. That and a Winchester so new it shone like diamonds in the sunlight. The rifle was cradled in his arms, baby style.

  His face was all screwed up in the glare and too far away for me to make out but he was one of the fattest men in or out of the West. Three hundred pounds at least.

  He lumbered toward us, moving fast for a big man. When he had covered half the distance that separated us, he halted. The girl had scrambled to her feet and run around behind me, where she tried to hide, holding onto my arm like it was the last handhold above Grand Canyon.

  The fat man laughed something in his gut and leveled the shiny Winchester at my heart.

  “Mister,” he boomed. “You better turn right around and head on outa here. This is no summer camp for city folks.”

  He had me there. My .45 was plainly visible, jutting from my shoulder holster.

  “I’ll take your word for that, friend,” I said. “But look at the girl. She’s in no condition to go traipsing around the countryside. She’s had too much sun and she’s been hurt. She needs food and water. Besides, she told me this was her home.”

  The fat man thought that was funny. “It mighta been before but it ain’t now. So you toss her over your shoulder and get a move on. She ain’t wanted here and the same goes for you.”

  “I’ve got money,” I said. “I can pay for whatever we use.”

  He was through talking to me. The Winchester indicated the direction behind us. “You got about one minute to start walkin’. Brandy will be all right. Ain’t nothin’ can kill that red devil.”

  Nothing except cruelty, unkind fat men and a Wyoming sadist. But I couldn’t argue with him. He had top cards. And he might have been right about Brandy at that. You can tell about most people, I guess. What they’re going to do. But you can never be sure about Indians. Brandy gave me a pretty good idea of what the first settlers and pioneers had been up against.

  Because while I’d been jawing with the fat man, convinced she was hovering behind me, scared spitless, she had managed to pick up a nice big rock about the size of a good fist. Before I could even talk her out of the foolishness of going up against a Winchester with a rock, she had let it fly with all the muscular concentration of her lithe little body. I twisted to one side before she pushed me out of the way. The rock shot toward the fat man like a missile on target.

  He had two choices. Ducking or firing. Maybe he was too slow but he didn’t duck. The Winchester split the space between Brandy and me with a high whine before the slug spent itself over the flatlands. That was all the fat man had time for. The rock thudded with a mushy, crunching noise just above the bridge of his nose. He fell over on his back like a sun-stricken horse, still hanging onto the rifle.

  I looked at Brandy. Funny name. But she wasn’t funny. Her breasts were heaving at the open folds of my jacket. Her eyes were fireballs of childish glee. I half-expected her to clap her hands, giggle or go into a war dance. No matter how you looked at it, she had just rung the bell and won a doll.

  I got over to the fat man in a hurry and looked him over. He should have been dead but he wasn’t. A rapid swelling over his right eye was purpling like magic. I felt his heart. Still beating under layers of fat. His fleshy face told me nothing. The nose was a small hook poking over a wide, full-lipped mouth that bared a mess of crooked, stained teeth. His hat was still jammed on his head which meant a tight fit or lots of hair. I didn’t look to find out. I fanned open his denim jacket which had covered a red corduroy shirt that had been washed too many times. I found something else. Something I didn’t want to find. A five-pointed badge pinned to the shirt. A tin star.

  “Not the sheriff —” I groaned aloud. Brandy padded over softly and spit down at the fallen giant. She would have drawn back a foot and kicked him but I got up and restrained her. She and Fatso were obviously old friends. I reached down and removed the Winchester from his lax fingers. He’d be coming to soon enough. I found three boxes of 30-30 shells in his hip pockets and stuck them in the pockets of the jacket Brandy was wearing.

  I looked at her so she could watch my mouth.

  “That was the wrong thing to do. Now we’ll get nothing. What is this place anyway?”

  She spread her hands to take in the sign which meant nothing.

  “Agreeable Wells. I can read and that’s one sign I don’t believe. Well, what is it? A town?”

  She shook her head.

  “A camp or something like that?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “Private property? You know — belong to somebody?”

  Her questioning eyes told me she didn’t know what belonging meant. I let it drop. I tried something else.

  “Where do you live? You — Brandy?”

  That got someplace. She grabbed my arm, motioning for me to follow her. Following her consisted of being led away from Fatso’s body, bearing to the left of the sign, in the opposite direction of Agreeable Wells. I couldn’t see what Agreeable Wells consisted of. The road leading from the sign dipped sharply toward a draw of some size which was lying quietly between the sloping hills. Skylined on the towering ridge above the draw where the land met the sky I saw a horseman, at least a thousand yards away — too far away to wonder about. No telling if there was a ranch in the vicinity or not. But there should have been. Wyoming was sheep and cattle country I knew, but what was Agreeable Wells? It also struck me that Fatso couldn’t be by himself so why hadn’t anyone come running when he blasted away with the Winchester? Unless he was the type who liked to pot away at ground squirrels and rabbits. It was too hot to think about it and my thirst had gotten as far out as the tip of my ongue. Brandy was my only solution. I followed her.

  She didn’t need my arm or my help anymore. She was striding briskly, her naked, nimble feet eating up yards of sandy ground. The terrain was much hillier now. Rises and swells broke up the landscape frequently. The plains of before were a myth. It was a different kind of peace. Not dull or dreary. You could hear a meadowlark chirping somewhere.

  The sun was going down but it was still hot. After only ten minutes walk I could see the cabin, a good five hundred yards away. Brandy murmured happily in her throat and raced ahead of me. I let her race. My shoes were beginning to feel like deep-sea diving weights.

  The cabin was an inspiring sight. Abe Lincoln might have slept there. Small, neat but very weatherbeaten. I expected a dog and there was one. Brandy was halfway to the cabin when a huge collie who could have doubled for Lassie came bounding out of the open front door, yipping all the way.

  Coming in, I saw the low wooden fence all around the place, the high stack of firewood chopped during the winter, shoring up one side of the cabin. I even saw flashes of pretty colors at the rear, suggesting a small, well-kept garden of some kind. There were miles of space surrounding the property but it looked as if Brandy’s cabin was a beacon in the wilderness. My city boy’s heart was taking a beating because Mother Nature was crowding me into a corner of Wyoming, saying, “Take a look around, chump. It’s nice out here, isn’t it?”

  It was.

  Or used to be.

  When I reached the cabin, the dog had stopped barking. He’d been howling before that but we’d been too far away to recognize the sound. Before I would walk into the cabin, Brandy came walking out. Only she didn’t walk.

  She was like a zombie. Her eyes were dry and cold. Her beautiful body, in my jacket and fedora, was rigid with something her eyes had seen and refused to believe. Or couldn’t believe.

  She walked past me without seeing me and stopped a few feet away, staring up at the sky. She was in no mood to watch my mouth. Probably didn’t even know I was there.

  I gripped the Winchester tighter and stepped over the threshold of the cabin. I was prepared but even I couldn’t take what the cabin had to offer sightseers and visitors.

  It wasn’t something you could list in a tourist gu
ide.

  4

  It wasn’t pretty. Unless you go in for Dante’s Inferno, charnel houses and Grade Z horror films.

  It was terrible. You could smell hyenas and freshly opened graves without seeing them. I had a hard time not throwing up the lunch I hadn’t had.

  The old man who’d been killed in the cabin must have run across a descendant of Jack the Ripper. He’d taken a long time to die, had had to watch his death coming, and none of it was very nice. It was remarkable that Brandy hadn’t run screaming from the sight of him.

  The smallness of the cabin had in no way impeded a maniac’s fun. It had only made the murder messier and crueler.

  The old man’s corpse hung from the ceiling.

  A lone beam of wood ran across the ceiling of the place. From it hung the long, lean body of the old man. I couldn’t see his face because his chin touched his thin, ancient chest where matted grey hairs curled and glistened like steel wool. At first glance the blood covering his naked length looked more like he’d done a sloppy job of interior painting. But the five knife handles jutting out from various parts of his anatomy weren’t paint brushes. The arms of the old man had been spread out as far as they could go along the wooden beam and lashed there with rawhide thongs. They had been his only support and the strain on his thin old neck and shoulders must have been excruciating.

  He had been a tall old man. The bloody tips of his shoes were inches from the planks of the floor. The maniac had shoved a solitary table and two chairs to one side to make room for his grisley target practice. The cabin wasn’t big enough so the killer must have stood in the doorway while the old man dangled in crucifixion, he threw his knives at the hanging, swaying target. He hadn’t missed with any of them. There were no knives on the floor. Just pools of blood and agony that marked the old man’s ordeal.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the corpse. The dog came in from outside, whimpering low. He sniffed at my dirty shoes, squatted on his haunches and stared up at his master with mournful eyes. Yet, where had he been when the murder happened? I looked him over. There wasn’t a mark on him. It didn’t make sense.