Gold Standard

by Kyell Gold

  Slowly, Sean picked up one of the blank cards and turned it over. The back was the same deck he had known since he was a cub, the double circles soothing in their regularity. He turned the card back over and saw a Three of Hearts. When he set it down on the table again, the design vanished.

  The third card, when he picked it up, revealed four clubs, and he shivered. The Three of Hearts was a warning: careful what you say. He’d seen it at the beginning of the job, too. The Four of Clubs was worse: lies and betrayal. Alone, it would have meant bad things for Jack. Together with the previously negative card, though, it seemed to be intimating that Jack would be betrayed if he weren’t careful. Or if Sean weren’t careful. He picked up all three cards and shuffled them back into the deck, paws moving automatically while his mind worked.

  Jack ruffled through clothes in the other room. Sean slid the cards back into his pocket. Whether Jack was causing the odd effect or just happened to be drawn to it, he could investigate later, on his own time. He had only encountered this effect once before, the day he’d left New Orleans. In any event, the unreliability of the cards was hardly enough for him to follow up. If Jack were cheating, he wasn’t doing it by any detectable means that would satisfy the fat wolf.

  “Want something to drink before you go?” The fox came out into the living room wearing a silk robe with an Oriental pattern.

  Sean got up and shook his head. “No, thanks. I should get back home.” He walked over to Jack and extended a paw. “Thanks for a nice night.”

  The fox grinned an open grin, tongue hanging slightly out. He stepped into Sean and slid his arms around him. “Anyone who just stuck the pot gets a hug before he goes.”

  “Mmm. Okay.” Sean couldn’t detect any hint that Jack was annoyed at the information he’d found in Sean’s wallet. He hugged back and let himself enjoy the feel of the fox’s slender body against him.

  “There’s no evidence that he’s cheating you purposefully,” he told the fat wolf the next evening. They’d met at the bar in the Persian again, and Sean had braced himself for the wolf’s anger with a scotch and a written copy of the contract he’d signed.

  “That’s fine,” the wolf said. He was on his second beer. “Glad to hear it. Here’s your money.”

  He slid an envelope across the bar to Sean, apparently not caring whether anyone saw it. Sean picked it up and stared at him. “So that’s it?”

  “Yeah. If he ain’t doing it intentionally, then...” The fat wolf shrugged. “I’ll play some other table.” He appeared to turn his attention to whatever game was on the TV for real this night, but Sean looked closer, at the twitching of the tip of his tail and the curl of a smile at the corners of his muzzle. He felt a shiver then, all down his own tail, and without even looking at the check he grabbed it and shoved it into his jacket.

  “Nice doing business with you,” he said, and slid off the stool, the scotch overwhelmed by the bad taste in his muzzle.

  He searched the casino floor, but Jack was nowhere in sight. Not working, or just on break? The cards in his pocket were tingling. His fur stood on end. The sense of urgency made his ears and tail twitch. He had to do a layout, or did he? He knew something was wrong, involving the fat wolf and Jack. He should find out what it was before asking the cards for direction.

  The big-bosomed vixen at the next blackjack table told him Jack had called in sick that night. She looked oddly at him when he asked if Jack had called himself. “Who else would have called?” she said, and that he didn’t know.

  The Full House Cafe was another dead end. No black foxes stood by the Philosopher’s Stone machines. He hurried out, down the street, to Jack’s apartment building, even though he hadn’t watched Jack enter the code, and he had no way of getting in.

  Luck, decidedly, was on his side. The gate was ajar. He checked up and down the street and then slipped inside.

  There, the insistent tingling of his cards grew stronger, raising his fur. He padded quickly to Jack’s apartment and listened at the door. No sound came from inside. He bent to sniff the door handle, and caught Jack’s scent, strong, and wolf, not him. Standing again, he considered the door. Knock, or just barge in? He lowered a paw to the door handle, and felt a brush against his tail. The tingling of the cards vanished.

  Sean turned and clapped a paw to his pocket. As soon as he turned, he saw Jack in the hallway, holding his deck of cards gingerly and looking grim.

  “I wouldn’t go in,” he said softly. “Your friends are mighty annoyed they haven’t been able to catch me.”

  “They’re not my friends,” Sean hissed.

  Jack arched an eyebrow. “They know a lot of things only you know.” He inclined his head toward the apartment door.

  “I didn’t tell them. They must have followed me.”

  “Very convenient. Plausible, even. I congratulate you.” His fingers riffled through the deck. “Good detective work.”

  “Jack...”

  “I think these will be adequate payment for the inconvenience of moving again,” the fox said, to himself. “I haven’t seen a deck as sensitive as these in a long time.”

  “They were my mother’s,” Sean said.

  Jack’s paws stopped and squared the deck. He looked up at Sean. “Fair trade, then.”

  “Listen, I didn’t mean to...I came back to warn you!”

  “Did you now?”

  “I believe you’re not really cheating him, but he thinks you are!”

  Their ears caught the noise at the same time. Jack flipped himself over the banister of the staircase in a moment. Sean held up a paw to his ear, a well-conditioned reaction to surprise.

  The door opened, allowing a large grey wolf muzzle to poke out into the hall. The nose twitched, smelling the air. “Hang on a second,” Sean said to nobody, and turned his attention to the wolf. “Sorry. My girlfriend was supposed to be home but she’s still playing the slots over at Caesar’s. With my money.” Without waiting for a reaction, he turned his attention back to the imaginary earpiece. “I know I gave it to you, honey, but it is my money. Yes, it is. Look, I’m coming over there. Don’t move.” He waved to the wolf and looked up from his imaginary conversation. “Sorry if I bothered you. You know how it is.”

  The wolf narrowed his eyes. “You seen a black fox?”

  “What, ever?”

  “In the building. Why you here in the building?”

  “Buddy of mine lives up on four.” Sean pointed up the stairs. “I was hoping to have a few beers with him, but now I gotta go to Caesar’s before all my goddamn beer money is gone. That okay with you?”

  The wolf studied him for a moment. Faintly, from below, Sean heard the flick of cards, and thought he felt a sympathetic twitch to his fur. He itched to run down there, but he waited, and finally the wolf just grumbled and stepped back into the room. He saw, for a moment, the door to Jack’s bedroom, and another part of him twitched. As soon as the door was closed, he spun and ran down the stairs to the next landing.

  “Jack?” he whispered.

  No response. The stair was empty.

  He hurried downstairs, skipping steps. Beyond the empty lobby, the gate stood closed. He was about to run outside when he spotted a card stuck into the row of mailboxes: the Jack of Clubs.

  On the back, he saw when he took it down, was his double circle pattern. The mailbox swung open easily. He reached inside, and pulled out his deck of cards.

  The tingling was gone from them, the crisis apparently passed. He sighed and sat with his back to the wall of the lobby, and then set the Jack of Clubs down on the floor. Slowly, he dealt out the top two cards, keeping his mind blank. Jack had been the last to shuffle this deck, and his imprint would remain on it for a little while. Sean was as sure of that as he was that Jack had not had to search the deck to find his significator. It would have risen to his fingers, drawn by the pull of the black fox.

  He dealt the Five of Spades and the Seven of Diamonds, and his muzzle curved into a grin. A change of opinion, v
ictory achieved at cost; and the reward from consistent effort, a card he seemed to see a lot. He looked at the tableau one more time and then scooped the cards up.

  So Sean’s little performance had changed Jack’s mind, at least enough to leave Sean his cards. And he knew they had power, so he knew that he did, too. Sean was interested in Jack for that, but he was also intrigued by the fox. What did he do with all that power? Just deal tables? As he walked out of the building, even though it was night, he whistled a tune to himself, singing the lyrics in his head. I was blue, just as blue as I could be / Ev’ry day was a cloudy day for me / Then good luck came a-knocking at my door / Skies were gray but they’re not gray anymore.

  It appeared that he had himself a case.

  Race to the Moon

  In 2007, Sofawolf Press began a literary journal called “New Fables,” intended to raise the bar of furry writing. It took me a couple years to get up an idea for a story, but I submitted “Race to the Moon” in 2009, and it was accepted for that year’s issue.

  I have always loved fables, and it was merely a matter of me figuring out how to make a romance work in fable form. I used a coyote and raven as the protagonists after a couple who are good friends of me and my husband, and that led to the tricksterish story you will find herein.

  Much to my surprise, “Race to the Moon” was nominated for a Washington Science Fiction Association (WSFA) Small Press Short Fiction award, which is a mouthful to say and a high honor. It did not win, but I was delighted that it was that highly regarded.

  [return to TOC]

  Far back when the world was new, or at least more new than it is now, back when the trees talked boldly in the daytime instead of whispering at night, when Coyote might appear one night at your fire and exchange stories with you until sunrise, one of Coyote’s children fell in love.

  His fur was black as pitch, so he went by the name Noc, which in the old tongue meant “night.” Noc didn’t know he had fallen in love, when it happened. He only knew that he kept coming back to the same clearing in the same woods, that even the top of the tallest mountain and the bottom of the deepest lake held less attraction than this peaceful dell in the trees of Ac-Ta-Mok.

  Now, in those days, the forest of Ac-Ta-Mok extended from the base of Old Opa, with his snow-covered crown, all the way to the shimmering blue expanse of Lady Asha. Ac-Ta-Mok, in the old tongue, means “he who covers all.” All the children lived with the trees in those days, and if the children of Coyote loved the clearings and dells, why, then, so much more room for the children of Fox among the tree roots, and Bear in the thick darkness at the heart of the forest, and Squirrel in the branches that reached to Father Hawaa and tickled his white beards of clouds.

  Of all the children of Coyote, Noc had traveled further and faster than any other. He had talked to Old Opa and Lady Asha, had played with the children of Water Rat and Sand Rat alike, and he knew every path through Ac-Ta-Mok. The clearing in which he found himself night after night held nothing special: a burbling brook nearby (but every clearing had one of those), bushes with sweet berries (he knew a hundred others like them), and a soft bed of leaves on which to curl up and sleep (throw a rock and try not to hit leaves). In fact, its only distinguishing feature was singularly annoying: a family of Raven’s children.

  Noc had no grievance against Raven’s children. But this particular family annoyed him for a particular reason: they talked every night about their travels to the nearby pond and marvelous journeys to the red-fruit tree. Most of them had never been further than a day’s flight from their nest. The exception was a young raveness whose name, he gathered, was Omber, which means “Shadow” in the old tongue. And Omber was the one who annoyed Noc most of all.

  As he lay beneath their tree curled up, Omber would tell her parents of the marvelous lake at the edge of the forest. They would exclaim at how large the world was, and the trees chimed in to praise Omber for her daring. Or she would tell them about flying to the top of the tallest tree, how Ac-Ta-Mok looked like a verdant carpet below her and Father Hawaa an azure blanket above. Noc listened to her stories and laughed to himself. She has barely tottered from her den, he said to himself. My sister’s daughter’s cubs have traveled farther. But his laughter had a jealous bite, and he could not say why every night, he came back to listen.

  One night, Omber was deep into the tale of flying thrice around the top of the tallest pine tree. “The moon looked so close,” she said, “I felt I could reach out and touch it with a wingtip.”

  “Were you not cold?” the old maple in which her nest rested asked. “The tops of my branches grow so cold when the wind blows that I can no longer feel them.”

  “Did you not get dizzy?” Her father, an old bird with one black glossy eye and one white cloudy eye, clacked his beak with worry. “When I fly higher than Father Maple here, my world seems to spin below me and I fear I might fall to the ground.”

  “Our Omber is a brave, strong bird,” her mother said, feathers fluffed out with pride. “Surely nobody has climbed as high as she, nor seen the things she has seen, none but the gods themselves.”

  At this, Noc had to uncurl himself from his hiding place and call up into the tree. “Then call me a god,” he said, “for my travels have taken me to places you can only dream of.”

  Omber’s father and mother cawed in alarm, and Father Maple’s branches rustled threateningly, but Omber folded her wings and dropped to a branch just above Noc, cocking her head to watch him with one shiny eye. “Hello, night traveler,” she said. “I wondered when you might favor us with words. No doubt the wonder of my stories rendered you mute.”

  Noc threw his head back and laughed. “I would not tell your stories to my cubs unless I wanted them to fall asleep,” he said.

  Omber clicked her beak. “Do you have cubs to tell?”

  Noc sat back on his haunches. “If I did, they would already have traveled further than you have.”

  Omber’s parents fluttered down to land on either side of her. “You shan’t talk to our daughter in that arrogant fashion,” her mother said. “There’s nobody so brave or strong as our Omber.”

  “No four-foot could understand what it is to fly,” her father said.

  “I’ve flown higher than Shu-Sha, the tallest pine in Ac-Ta-Mok,” Noc boasted. “I’ve been to lands from which Ac-Ta-Mok is no more than a whisper of a legend of a story.”

  Omber turned her head slightly, looking up at the moon with her other eye. “So you’ve been to the moon, of course,” she said.

  Noc waved a paw dismissively. “The moon,” he said. “More times than you have feathers.” He had not, in fact, been to the moon, nor known anyone who had, so he was certain that Omber had not been either. The moon was sometimes called Coyote’s Grin, and sometimes called Thunderbird’s Eye, but it was not a living place as far as Noc knew, and anyway it was all the way up in the sky where one might easily fall.

  “I’ve never been,” Omber said. “But I have always wanted to go.”

  Noc grinned a Coyote grin. His tail thumped the ground. “I’ll race you,” he said. “To the moon and back.” In his mind, he thought she would never agree to such a bet. She would back down, even in front of all these silly creatures who admired her.

  “That hardly seems fair,” Omber said, “seeing as you know the way and I do not.”

  “The way is easy.” Noc lifted his nose to the heavens. “You run to the edge of the world—or fly to the edge of the world—and then climb up the bowl of the sky until you reach the moon. Nothing could be simpler.”

  “Very well,” Omber said. “Since it is so simple, I accept.” She spread her wings, momentarily blocking the moon from Noc’s sight, and began her ascent.

  “What? Wait!” Noc jumped to his feet and began circling the ground, looking up.

  The raven settled on a higher branch and gazed down while her parents cawed laughter. “Yes?” she asked calmly.

  Noc’s ears flattened at the laughter. “Nothing,”
he said, willing his fur to smooth down. “I only meant to wish you good luck. I’ll see you next on the moon.”

  “If you’re fast,” Omber said, spreading her wings again and soaring up the side of Father Maple, who parted his branches to allow her passage.

  Noc looked from Omber’s mother to her father. “Well,” he said. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you both, but I think I have given your daughter enough of a head start.” He affected a yawn and padded off into the forest until he was sure they could no longer hear him. Then he broke into a run.

  Noc had several times climbed Shu-Sha and curled up in the topmost branches. He thought that perhaps he could leap to the moon from there. So he ran to the old tree, faster than you can say lickety-split, and called out to her, “Ancient One, may I visit your uppermost branches?” For it is terribly bad manners to climb a tree without asking, and the tree may throw you down if you do.

  Shu-Sha shook her branches to show she was agreeable, so Noc sprang upon them without further delay. In a trice, he was at the top, gazing at the fat white moon hanging from the bowl of the sky. He stretched out his neck, and then he stretched out his paw, and then he stretched out his fingers, but he could not reach the moon.

  “Ho, night traveler,” said a familiar voice. “I thought you were headed to the edge of the world.”

  Turning, he spied Omber the raven, circling him, her beak curved in a smile. He brought his paw back to his eyes as if shading them from the moon’s light. “I was merely looking to make sure my course was clear,” he said. “For once I set out, I don’t wish to stop for any obstacle.”

  “You four-foots make traveling so complicated,” Omber said breezily. “Would you not just go and worry about your obstacles as you encounter them?”

  Noc strove to rest casually against the Shu-Sha’s whisker-thin topmost branch. “The power of flight has made you lazy,” he said. “But by all means, continue on your way and I will meet you at the moon, if you don’t encounter any obstacles.”