Noose Jumpers: A Mythological Western

by Trevor H. Cooley

  When he didn’t immediately obey, she clasped his bound hands in hers. Her touch on his exposed skin was cold and clammy. The bindings around Sandy’s wrists and middle finger seemed to loosen and she said, “As proof of my good intentions.”

  Sandy jerked his hands away from hers and the thin rope came apart in rotted shreds. He flexed his fingers and rubbed his hands together, glancing at Pecos.

  The specter nodded. “It’s okay. She’s working with you for now, but the rules might change, so keep your wits about you.”

  Trusting in his mentor’s guidance, Sandy allowed his eyes to settle on hers. “Alright. Go on, get a good look.”

  The witch reached behind his neck and pulled his head down towards hers until their foreheads touched. Her overlarge pupils gazed into his. This close, her two strange eyes merged together until they looked like one big, even stranger, eye.

  He steeled himself for what might happen next, expecting to feel her reaching into his mind and probing his thoughts in some unpleasant way, but he felt nothing. After a few seconds she let go of the back of his neck. Then she stuck out her tongue and licked him from the bottom of his chin up across his lips to the base of his nose.

  He caught a whiff of corpse-like breath and pulled back in disgust. He wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and followed up with his fingers, trying to scrape away any trace of her saliva. “Ugh! Was that part necessary?”

  She laughed and flipped up one hand in casual dismissal. “I sense your troubled soul. It’s understandable. Your eyes are guided by the Eagle; an honorable spirit. Your current profession does not suit you. You should change it. Banditry is for those with darker minds.”

  “That wasn’t my question,” Sandy said.

  “The fact you didn’t ask it aloud don’t mean it wasn’t asked,” she replied.

  “No. My question was about Jeb Wickee,” he insisted.

  “Jebediah Joseph Wickee?” The witch let out a snort. “He’s long been a thorn in your side, hasn’t he?” She gave him a level gaze. “I know his particular proclivities quite well.”

  “Of course you do,” Pecos said, folding his arms in irritation. “Should’ve known you’d be involved.”

  “I have not seen him in years,” she replied to Pecos offhandedly, her attention still on Sandy.

  “Still, this is good news. His ‘proclivities’ are what I came to talk to you about,” said Sandy. “Can you tell me how to defeat him?”

  “I could,” she said. “But that is not a one-question question.”

  “How could it not be?” Pecos protested.

  “To understand Jebediah Wickee’s abilities he’s got to understand how he got them. And to understand that he has to know how witchery works and you’ve evidently done a piss-poor job of explaining,” the witch replied flippantly.

  “Then just give me the one-question version of the answer,” Sandy suggested.

  She grinned. “I met your current problem not much more than twelve years ago. When I first saw him, poor Jebediah was in a sad state. Penniless, half-starved, and near dying of thirst, he had stumbled to the bank of my river. I watched as he drank his fill, vomited it up, drank again, then passed out. When he awoke it was late at night, the moon was high overhead, and I was there waiting. I had a fire a-going and a pot of stew a-boiling.

  “I wasn’t wearing the face I am now,” she added. “Just one look at him and, striking as I may be, my instincts told me he wouldn’t be smitten with a negress visitor. No, I had stolen a face from a local beauty that seemed more appropriate for this particular tortured soul. I was right. His dirty face brightened right up when he saw me. He plum asked me if I was an angel!”

  A giggle passed the witch’s lips at the memory and Sandy wondered if the face she wore now was the real one. It was the face Pecos knew, but Sandy had never heard a black woman refer to herself as a negress before. There also were other incongruities about her that told Sandy she was putting on a show; like the way she slipped occasional base colloquialisms into her otherwise highly educated language.

  One thing for sure though, the witch knew how to spin a yarn. While she told the story of her meeting with Jeb Wickee, Sandy could see it playing out in his mind like a moving picture. He wasn’t the only one so fascinated either. The Coyote’s Pup had broken his otherwise steadfast posture and was leaning forward to better hear her, one eye slightly cracked open.

  “I didn’t answer his ridiculous notion, but I let his eyes take me in as I ladled him out a bowl of stew. While he ate, I asked Jebediah what had led him to the banks of my river in his lowly condition. The poor man, his stomach full and hoping to please the beauty before him, spilled a tale of awful woe. A friend of his, someone he trusted, someone he revered like a star in the firmament, had betrayed him.”

  Sandy frowned. Star in the firmament? There was only one person that description fit.

  “You see, this friend of Jebediah’s had made the Black Spot bandits angry and the two of them had been forced to go on the run. They rode their horses as hard as they dared and Jebediah’s horse had died from the strain. His supposed friend, afraid of being caught, told Jebediah to hide and rode away, leaving him behind.”

  “It couldn’t have gone down like that,” Sandy argued. “Bobby would never abandon a friend. Jeb was the betrayer.”

  “Is that so?” the witch said with a smile.

  Sandy realized that he had given something away with his outburst. He didn’t know why that mattered, but she certainly seemed pleased and that unsettled him.

  She continued, “Well, undoubtedly he was in the end. Elsewise, he wouldn’t have this power you came to question me about. But at the time I spoke to him, Jebediah was the one who had been wronged. Days had gone by and still, this ‘Bobby’ had not returned, which was why I had found him in his low state.

  “As he told me his tale of woe I sensed in him potential. His increasing anger with his friend had turned him into a man whose heart was teetering on the edge of blackness. He was ripe to join the Witchery Way.”

  “It was a misunderstanding,” Sandy said. “Surely he knew that Bobby wouldn’t leave him behind without reason.”

  “He said as much to me, but he didn’t truly believe it. You see, there was more to it than that. This resentment had been building for a long time before his friend left him behind. Jebediah had always been a weak man while his friend was strong and people saw this. Whenever they were in the same room together, Jebediah was either ignored or looked down on. He had long grown tired of life in his friend’s shadow.

  “Still, when I left him there at daybreak, he was determined to wait for his friend. Days went by and this Bobby didn’t show. Jebediah stayed by the banks of the river and I visited him every night. By the third night, Jebediah had grown wise to the fact that there was something different about me. When I admitted to being a witch he didn’t blink. No. First thing he did was ask me if I could make him stronger.”

  “You’re the one who gave him his power,” Sandy said. He felt a surge of anger towards this woman, but at the same time he was eager to know more.

  “Power such as he has cannot be given by one person, even by someone like me. All I did was teach him how to obtain it. It wasn’t all that difficult. He already had an undeveloped talent. He figured out the rest of it once I had explained the nature of witchery.” She cocked her head. “What about you, Sandy Tucker? Do you wish to learn?”

  Sandy’s frown deepened and Pecos snorted. “He ain’t here to join your club, Martha.”

  She rolled her irisless eyes. “I am not speaking of joining the Witchery Way, Pecos. That would require min giving up his humanity and he does not have that darkness within him. I speak of learning the truth of the magic of human kind. It is something humankind uses every second of every day and yet they do not even know it!”

  “I told him about that part already,” Pecos said. “It’s the rest he don’t understand.”

  “He does not know,” she said. “
I have seen the innocence in his eyes.”

  “I told him,” Pecos insisted. He nodded to Sandy. “Tell her what you know about how power is gained.”

  Sandy blinked back at him. He was pretty sure he had gotten the gist of it from what Pecos had explained. He tried to put it into words. “It comes from other people. If enough people believe you have power, you gain it.”

  The witch let out a guffaw and sneered at the specter. “How overly simplistic! This is so like you, Pecos. You should have been able to tell him everything, but you were always too proud to listen when I spoke. No, you were far too busy looking for the next rabbit you could chase,” she said pointedly. “And you haven’t changed. You had resources all around you but no, you were too proud to speak with them. Instead, you bring your charge to me. To me! Ha!”

  “Now-now. I had my reasons,” Pecos said. “There’s agreed-upon rules and-!”

  “Agreed-upon foolishness!” the witch spat and whirled back to face Sandy. She raised one finger. “I have what you need to know, but I already told you how I knew Jebediah Wickee. That’s one question answered.”

  “That wasn’t my question!” Sandy said. “I asked you how to defeat him!”

  “Semantics! I have been letting you take advantage of my generous nature so far,” she said. “You may think I’ll just continue to tell you what I know willy-nilly, but no. If you wish to know the truth behind his power, I will require further payment.”

  Sandy still wasn’t sure how much of his money she intended to take for answering his first question. He gritted his teeth. “What do you want?”

  “Why to place my claim on your death, of course,” she said with a hiss.

  Pecos scowled. “I was wondering when you’d get around to this part.”

  Sandy’s abdomen had clenched again. He wondered if he would end his night the way Tough Jim had; the witch lifting him in the air by his heart, urine dripping from his boots . . . He let out a slow breath. Stay calm. “What do you mean by placing a claim?”

  She chuckled. “It is simple. I set the parameters of our next meeting. If they happen, I take your life. If you somehow manage to avoid my terms, the way Pecos did, you can rob me of my prize. It is a gamble on my part, actually.”

  “What are your terms?” Sandy asked.

  “When this night ends, our palaver will be over and we will be enemies. If you should ever again enter my territory under the light of a three quarter moon, I shall place my claim and take your life,” she declared, her expression alight with malice.

  Sandy stared at her for a long moment. “You’re serious? That’s it?” he said, his tension easing. “All I have to do is avoid the banks of the Rio Grande during a three quarter moon?”

  “For the rest of your life, son,” Pecos clarified.

  “Sure, but as long as I keep that in mind, it seems easy to avoid. Too easy, in fact,” Sandy said suspiciously, eyeing the witch. “Why would you do it?”

  “The potential payoff is worth it,” she said with a throaty groan, not at all concerned by the light way he was taking it. “To one living the Witchery Way, great power can be had by taking a life. Especially in the life of someone as talented as you.”

  “Done,” Sandy said with a shrug.

  “You should know,” the witch added. “It would not be a painless death. And you would not be allowed to fight it. Should the parameters be met, you would be forced to lay down and accept your fate willingly.”

  “I got that idea from the way you said it the first time,” Sandy said. “And I agree to the price. So tell me what I need to know to beat Jeb’s powers.”

  She smirked. “I am enjoying this palaver very much, Sandy Tucker. I do hope that you fall into my clutches when all is said and done.”

  Sandy thought it odd that the witch referred to this particular event as a palaver. In his mind, a palaver was generally an overlong and genteel conversation that ends in a result of no tangible importance. He felt that the results of this meeting would have great importance and wondered if perhaps this witch had been alive so long that her perspective had gone askew.

  (Observer’s note: The word palaver has shifted in meaning often over the last few dozen decades. As you may have deduced from my previous uses of the word, Sandy’s understanding of the definition is one I don’t ascribe to. In my experience, though palavers can sometimes be overlong, some of the most important decisions in history come as a result of them.)

  “To know how Jebediah’s powers can be overcome, you must first understand the place of mankind in the world around us,” the witch began. “Though there are many spirits in the world, both large and small, weak and strong, man has power above them all. In fact, the spirit of humankind is power itself.”

  Sandy’s brow furrowed. “I don’t see it.”

  “This is because you lack the ability of true sight,” she declared, pointing at her own disfigured eyes. “In the eyes of the spirit, mankind is a beacon. Imagine that every person born into this world is a bonfire, lighting the world around it. The power that blazes from your minds affects all you think on. Your thoughts create. They enhance. They take away.”

  The way she spoke of mankind suggested that she was an outsider and, according to Navajo belief, she was. To become a skinwalker and walk the Witchery Way a person had to commit an act so horrible that they lost their humanity. Sandy wondered what she looked like in the eyes of the spirit.

  The witch raised her right fist. The blood coating her hand had dried and browned and the surface cracked like mud baked in the sun. “All of it. The sky above! The fact that the sun rises! Essentially, the world around us exists because of the collective beliefs of mankind over the ages.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “From the look on your face, I know you find this hard to believe.”

  “Us the creators?” Sandy scoffed. She must not have met the same people he had. “Are you saying there is no God?”

  The witch laughed. “Of course there’s a God. Hell, there are as many Gods as there are religions! The real question you should ask is who came first? Did your Gods create man or did man create Them? After all, it is your belief that holds Them up.”

  Sandy frowned. “I can look at my hand all day and imagine a juicy steak in it, but nothing’s gonna appear.”

  “True,” she said. “Like all men you lack mental focus. Your beliefs are scattered in a thousand directions. For a single man to accomplish such a thing would be impossible. But what if a hundred people shared that same desire for you to have that steak? A thousand? The steak might appear.”

  “Or a cow might just wander by, begging to be slaughtered,” Pecos suggested.

  This line of discussion was going deeper than Sandy wanted to go. “So our thoughts make things happen. I grasp the idea.”

  She curled her lip in disgust at his lack of awe at her revelations. “You grasp little. Every man has power to affect the world around them, as I have said. But sometimes people are born with something extra; a talent that allows them to affect the world differently than others. Some men find that they have superior stamina to others. Some women have the ability to wind men around their fingers. Jebediah was one of those men born with an otherworldly talent. In his case, he had a natural predilection for avoiding bullets.”

  “Don’t we all?” Sandy asked.

  The witch wasn’t amused. “Jebediah had more than a simple desire to stay out of a bullet’s path. He actually had the ability to push them out of his way,” she claimed. “At the time, this ability was weak. After all, he had never used it on purpose. But from his descriptions of the various gunfights he and Bobby had been in, it was likely that his talent had already saved him a time or two.

  “Now, the first way to grow an otherworldly talent is to become aware of it. Once one of these rare men knows of his ability, he turns the power of his own belief on it and thus increases it. I helped Jebediah along that course when I pointed his talent out to him.”

  “So he has strength because he’s
sure of himself,” Sandy said. The sheriff had been brimming with confidence on the day of the robbery.

  “That’s the beginning,” the witch replied. “But, as I was saying, the belief of a single man, no matter how focused, can only do so much.”

  “He needed others to believe in it too,” Sandy said in understanding.

  She nodded. “I told him to head out into the world proclaiming his immunity to gunfire.”

  “Convincing folks of that would be dangerous,” Pecos said.

  She snickered. “That’s true, but I wasn’t the one taking the risk. In the beginning he would have had to rely on the power of his talent and self-confidence to be superior to the ability and belief of the one shooting at him. But the more that people saw his talent in action, the easier it would get.”

  Sandy thought of the town of Puerta Muerte and the hundreds of residents that believed in Jeb’s ability. That was a lot of human mind power. But something else about what she said pricked his mind. “Then his power isn’t perfect. A bullet can hit him.”

  Pecos snorted. “Well, sure. If someone just as talented did the shooting.”

  “Someone like you,” said the witch, touching the center of Sandy’s chest with her right index finger. “You have a talent as well, Eagle Eyes; one that runs contrary to Jebediah’s. You don’t miss. You can see the bullet hitting the target and it does every time.”

  Sandy’s brow furrowed. He had never considered his skill to be otherworldly. He was just good at shooting. “Only I missed him last time.”

  “Yeah, but you know about your talent now,” Pecos said excitedly. “You see? That makes you all the stronger.”

  “Will that be enough for me to hit him now?” Sandy asked the witch.

  “I doubt it,” she said with a shrug. “He has a town behind him and you have you. But who can say? Maybe you catch him at a bad time.”

  “There’s still the problem of getting to him,” Pecos added. “It’s hard to shoot a man who stops you in your tracks.”

  “What is this you speak of?” the witch asked. They told her of the sheriff’s power of command and she shook her head. “That was not a talent of his when I met him. As I said before, Jebediah was a weak man by nature, not one whose presence inspired others to obey.” She pursed her lips, deep in thought. Then her eyes widened. “Ahh, I see. He listened closer than I thought. It seems your friend Jebediah has acquired himself an artifact.”