Steampunked

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “Well, mean to. I could use a bit of color and poetry in my life.”

  “An ambassador is more colorful than a clerk.”

  “An ambassador is little more than a clerk who travels. Maybe it’s not so bad, but I just don’t feel tailored to it.”

  “Then we are both cut from the wrong cloth, Cody.”

  Hickok finished his cigarette and looked out into the night. The shapes of the cherry trees flew by, looked like multi-armed men waving gentle goodbyes.

  “It seems I have done nothing with my life,” Hickok said after a while, and he did not look at Cody when he said it. He continued to watch the night and the trees. “Today when you told me about Custer and Yoshii, I did not feel sadness. Surprise, but not sadness. Now I know why. I envy them. Not their deaths, but their glory. A hundred years from now, probably more, they will be remembered. I will be forgotten a month after my passing-if it takes that long.”

  Cody reached over and opened a window. The wind felt cool and comfortable. He tapped his pipe on the outside of the train. Sparks flew from it and blew down the length of the cars like fireflies in a blizzard. Cody left the window open, returned his pipe to his pocket.

  “You know,” Cody said, “I wanted to go out West during the Japanese wars: the time the Japanese were trying to push down into Colorado on account of the gold we’d found there, and on account of we’d taken the place away from them back when it was part of New Japan. I was young then and I should have gone. I wanted to be a soldier. I might have been a great scout, or a buffalo hunter, had my life gone different then.”

  “Do you sometimes wonder that your dreams are your real life, Cody? That if you hope for them enough they become solid? Maybe our dreams are our trains not taken.”

  “Come again.”

  “Our possible futures. The thing we might have done had we just edged our lives another way.”

  “I hadn’t thought much about it actually, but I like the sound of it.”

  “Will you laugh if I tell you my dream?”

  “How could I? I’ve just told you mine.”

  “I dream that I’m a gunman-and with these light-sensitive eyes that’s a joke. But that’s what I am. One of those long-haired shootists like in the Dime Novels, or that real-life fellow Wild Jack McCall. I even dream of lying face down on a card table, my pistol career ended by some skulking knave who didn’t have the guts to face me and so shot me from behind. It’s a good dream, even with the death, because I am remembered, like those soldiers who sided at The Little Big Horn. It’s such a strong dream I like to believe that it is actually happening somewhere, and that I am that man that I would rather be.”

  “I think I understand you, friend. I even envy Morse and these damn trains; him and his telegraph and ‘pulsating energy.’ Those discoveries will make him live forever. Every time a message is flashed across the country or a train bullets along on the crackling power of its fire line, it’s like thousands of people crying his name.”

  “Sometimes-a lot of the time-I just wish that for once I could live a dream.”

  They sat in silence. The night and the shadowed limbs of the cherry trees fled by, occasionally mixed with the staggered light of the moon and the stars.

  Finally Cody said, “To bed. Cherrywood is an early stop.” He opened his pocket watch and looked at it. “Less than four hours. The wife will awake and call out the Cavalry if I’m not there.”

  As Cody stood, Hickok said, “I have something for you.” He handed Cody a handful of lucifers.

  Cody smiled. “Next time we meet, friend, perhaps I will have my own.” As he stepped into the aisle he said, “I’ve enjoyed our little talk.”

  “So have I,” Hickok said. “I don’t feel any happier, but I feel less lonesome.”

  “Maybe that’s the best we can do.”

  Hickok went back to his cabin but did not try to be overly quiet. There was no need. Mary Jane, when drunk, slept like an anvil.

  He slipped out of his clothes and crawled into bed. Lay there feeling the warmth of his wife’s shoulder and hip; smelling the alcoholic aroma of her breath. He could remember a time when they could not crawl into bed together without touching and expressing their love. Now he did not want to touch her and he did not want to be touched by her. He could not remember the last time she had bothered to tell him she loved him, and he could not remember the last time he had said it and it was not partly a lie.

  Earlier, before dinner, the old good times had been recalled and for a few moments he adored her. Now he lay beside her feeling anger. Anger because she would not try. Or could not try. Anger because he was always the one to try, the one to apologize, even when he felt he was not wrong. Trains on a different track going opposite directions, passing fast in the night, going nowhere really. That was them.

  Closing his eyes he fell asleep instantly and dreamed of the blonde lovely in blue and white calico with a thick, black Japanese belt. He dreamed of her without the calico, lying here beside him white-skinned and soft and passionate and all the things his wife was not.

  And when the dream ended, so did his sleep. He got up and dressed and went out to the parlor car. It was empty and dark. He sat and smoked a cigarette. When that was through he opened a window, felt and smelled the wind. It was a fine night. A lover’s night.

  Then he sensed the train was slowing.

  Cherrywood already?

  No, it was still too early for that. What gave here?

  In the car down from the one in which he sat, a lamp was suddenly lit, and there appeared beside it the chiseled face of the Cherokee porter. Behind him, bags against their legs, were three people: the matronly lady, the boy who loved trains and the beautiful blonde woman.

  The train continued to slow.

  By God, he thought, they are getting off.

  Hickok got out his little, crumpled train schedule and pressed it out on his knee. He struck a lucifer and held it down behind the seat so that he could read. After that he got out his pocket watch and held it next to the flame. Two-fifteen. The time on his watch and that on the schedule matched. This was a scheduled stop-the little town and fort outside of Cherrywood. He had been right in daydreaming. The girl was going here.

  Hickok pushed the schedule into his pocket and dropped the dead match on the floor. Even from where he sat, he could see the blonde girl. As always, she was smiling. The porter was enjoying the smile and he was giving her one back.

  The train began to stop.

  For a moment, Hickok imagined that he too were getting off here and that the blonde woman was his sweetheart. Or better yet, would be. They would meet in the railway station and strike up some talk and she would be one of those new modern women who did not mind a man buying her a drink in public. But she would not be like his wife. She would drink for taste and not effect.

  They would fall instantly in love, and on occasion they would walk in the moonlight down by these tracks, stand beneath the cherry trees and watch the trains run by. And afterwards they would lie down beneath the trees and make love with shadows and starlight as their canopy. When it was over, and they were tired of satisfaction, they would walk arm in arm back towards the town, or the fort, all depending.

  The dream floated away as the blonde girl moved down the steps and out of the train. Hickok watched as the porter handed down their bags. He wished he could still see the young girl, but to do that he would have to put his head out the window, and he was old enough that he did not want to appear foolish.

  Goodbye, Little Pretty, he thought. I will think and dream of you often.

  Suddenly he realized that his cheeks were wet with tears. God, but he was unhappy and lonely. He wondered if behind her smiles the young girl might be lonely too.

  He stood and walked toward the light even as the porter reached to turn it out.

  “Excuse me,” Hickok said to the man. “I’d like to get off here.”

  The porter blinked. “Yes sir, but the schedule only calls for three.
”

  “I have a ticket for Cherrywood, but I’ve changed my mind, I’d like to get off here.”

  “As you wish, sir.” The porter turned up the lamp. “Best hurry, the train’s starting. Watch your step. Uh, any luggage?”

  “None.”

  Briskly, Hickok stepped down the steps and into the night. The three he had followed were gone. He strained his eyes and saw between a path of cherry trees that they were walking toward the lights of the rail station.

  He turned back to the train. The porter had turned out the light and was no longer visible. The train sang its song. On the roof he saw a ripple of blue-white fulmination jump along the metal fire line. Then the train made a sound like a boiling teapot and began to move.

  For a moment he thought of his wife lying there in their cabin. He thought of her waking in Cherrywood and not finding him there. He did not know what she would do, nor did he know what he would do.

  Perhaps the blonde girl would have nothing to do with him. Or maybe, he thought suddenly, she is married or has a sweetheart already.

  No matter. It was the ambition of her that had lifted him out of the old funeral pyre, and like a phoenix fresh from the flames, he intended to stretch his wings and soar.

  The train gained momentum, lashed shadows by him. He turned his back on it and looked through the cherrywood path. The three had reached the rail station and had gone inside.

  Straightening his collar and buttoning his jacket, he walked toward the station and the pretty blonde girl with a face like a hopeful heart.

  The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down

  Foreword

  Somewhere out in space the damaged shuttle circled, unable to come down. Its occupants were confused and frightened.

  Forever to the left of the ship was a rip in the sky. And through the rip they saw all sorts of things. Daylight and dark. Odd events.

  And dat ole shuttle jes go’n roun’ and roun’ and roun’.

  (1)

  In Search Of

  The shiny steam man, forty feet tall and twenty feet wide, not counting his ten-foot-high conical hat, hissed across the prairie, farted up hills, waded and puffed through streams and rivers. He clanked and clattered. He made good time. His silver metal skin was bright with the sun. The steam from his hat was white as frost. Inside of him, where the four men rode in swaying leather chairs, it was very hot, even with the steam fan blowing.

  But they pushed on, working the gears, valves, and faucets, forever closing on the Dark Rider. Or so they hoped.

  Bill Beadle, captain of the expedition, took off his wool cap and wiped the sweat from his face with an already damp forearm. He tried to do this casually. He did not want the other three to know how near heat exhaustion he was. He took deep breaths, ran a hand through his sweat-soaked hair, and put his cap back on. The cap was hot, and though there was really nothing official about his uniform or his title of captain, he tried to live by a code that maintained the importance of both.

  Hamner and Blake looked at him casually. They were red-faced and sweat-popped. They shifted uncomfortably in their blue woolen uniforms. Through the stained glass eyes of the steam man they could see the hills they had entered, see they were burned brown from the sun.

  It was midday, and this gave them several hours to reach the land of the Dark Rider, but by then it would be night, and the Dark Rider and his minions, the apes in trousers, would be out and powerful.

  Only John Feather, their Indian guide, looked cool in his breechcloth and headband holding back his long, beaded, black hair. He had removed his moccasins and was therefore barefoot. Unlike the others, he was not interested in a uniform, or to be more precise, he was not interested in being hot when he didn’t have to be. He could never figure out the ways of white men, though he often considered on them. But mostly he considered the steam man, and thought: Neat. This cocksucker can go. A little bouncy on the ass, even in these spring-loaded seats, but the ole boy can go. The white men do come up with a good thing now and then.

  They clanked through the hills some more, and through the right ear canal of the steam man, also stained glass, they could see the wrecks.

  Beadle was always mystified by the wrecks.

  Most people called them saucers. They lay in heaps and shatters all over the place. Strange skeletons that weren’t quite bone had been found in some of them, and there were even mummified remains of others. Green squid with multiple eyes and fragments of clothing.

  There was no longer anyone alive who really knew what had happened, but what had been handed down was there had been a war, and though damn near everybody came, nobody really won. Not the world, not the saucer people. But the weapons they used, they had brought about strange things.

  Like rips in the sky, and the Dark Rider.

  Or so it was rumored. No one really knew. Story was the saucers had ripped open the sky and come to this world through a path alongside the sky. And that after the war, when the saucer men gave it up and went home, the Earth changed and the rips stayed. What was odd about the rips was you could toss things into them, people could enter them, and things could come out. And there were things to see. Great batlike creatures with monstrous wingspans. Snake-headed critters with flippers and rows of teeth, paddling across the blue-green ether inside the rip. Strange craft jetting across odd landscapes. All manner of things. If you stood near the dark openings, which reached from sky to ground, you could feel them pulling at you, like a vacuum, and if you stepped too close, well then you were gone. Sucked into the beyond. Sometimes the people who were pulled, or went by choice into the rips, came back. Sometime they didn’t. But even those that came back bore no real information. It was even reported by a few that the moment they stepped through the rip, they merely exited where they had entered.

  Curious.

  As for the Dark Rider, no one knew his origin. A disease caused by something from one of the saucers was the usual guess, but that’s all it was. A guess. The Dark Rider sucked blood like a vampire, had prodigious strength and odd powers, but had no aversion to crosses, garlic, or any of the classical defenses. Except one. Sunlight. He could not tolerate it. That much had been established.

  He also had an army of apelike critters who traveled with him and did most of the shit work. When the Dark Rider was not able to do it, he sent the apes in britches to do his work. Rape. Murder. Torture. Usually by impalement. His method was to have the victim stripped naked and placed on an upright stake with the point in the anus. The pressure of the victim’s weight would push him or her down the length of the shaft until the point came out the upper part of the torso. Usually the neck or mouth, or even at times through the top of the head.

  Beadle had seen enough of this to give him nightmares for the rest of his life, and he had determined that if it ever appeared he was about to be captured alive by the Dark Rider or his minions, he would kill himself. He kept a double-barreled derringer in his boot for just such a circumstance.

  The steam man clanked on.

  *****

  It was near nightfall when they stomped out of the foothills and into the vast forest that grew tall and dark before them and was bordered by a river. It was a good thing, this forest and river. They were out of wood and water, and therefore out of steam.

  Though the night brought bad possibilities, it was also preferable to the long, hot days. They grabbed their water bags, pulled their Webb rifles over their shoulders on straps, and disembarked from the steam man via a ladder that they poked out of its ass. Like automated turds, they dropped out of the steam man’s butt and into the coolness of the night.

  The white men left John Feather to guard the steam man with an automatic pistol and a knife on his hip, a Webb rifle slung over his shoulder on a strap, a bow and a quiver of arrows, and went down to the river for water.

  John Feather knew he would be better off inside the steam man, in case the Dark Rider and his bunch showed up, but the night air felt great and sucked at
a man’s common sense. Behind him the steam man popped and crackled as the nocturnal air cooled it.

  John Feather tapped the ammo belt strapped across his chest and back, just to make sure it was there. He took one of the heavy clips from his bandolier and squeezed it with his fingers, a habit he had developed when nervous. After a time, he put the oiled clip back on the bandolier and wiped his greasy fingers on his thigh. He looked for a time in every direction, listened intently. Normally, though he liked them, he didn’t miss the white men much, but tonight, he would be glad to have them back. Safety in numbers.

  *****

  Beadle, Hamner, and Blake inched down the slick riverbank, stopped at the water, and listened to it roar and churn dirt from the bank. There had been a big rain as of late, and the river was wild from it. The reflection of the moon was on the river and it wavered in the water as if it were something bright lying beneath the ripples.

  Beadle felt good outside of the metal man. It was wonderful to not have his ass bouncing and his insides shook, to be away from all that hissing and metal clanking.

  The roar of the river, the wind through the pines, the moon on the water, the real moon in the sky, bright and gold and nearly full, was soothing.

  He eased one of his water bags into the river, listened to it gurgle as it filled.

  “We ought to bring Steam down here, Captain,” Hamner said. He had removed his cap, which was pretty much the understanding when nightfall came, and fixed it through his belt. The moonlight shone on his red hair and made it appear to be a copper bowl. “We could camp closer to the water.”

  “I’m afraid Steam’s furnaces may be too cold and too low of fuel to walk another inch,” Beadle said. “There’s just enough left for us to get settled for the night. It would take an hour to heat him up. At least. I’m not sure it’s worth it just to have him walk a few hundred feet.”

  “It is pleasant here, though,” Hamner said.

  “Not so pleasant we don’t need to get this over with and get inside,” Beadle said.