by John Boyd
“If I ever see you again, you’d better bring this bandanna with you, washed and ironed. You’d better start thinking about taking in washing for a living and forget gunfighting.”
“Hey,” Near-Sighted Charlie yelled from down the street, “that one for me or for the doc?”
“Get back to Will Trotter, undertaker,” Mr. Bain shouted to the sawed-off man who was feeling his way down the boardwalk. “This one’s for the doctor.”
Gabriella was first to stand above them, her hand clutching her throat, looking down at her suitor’s blood in horror as other spectators converged from the general store, smithy shop, post office, hardware store and hotel.
“I saw it all happen, sheriff,” Mr. Bain explained as Sheriff Faust walked up. “Peyton drew first, trying to gun down McCloud. His pistol cleared the holster before Mr. McCloud even went for his. Mr. McCloud waited, drew second, and, for Christ’s sake, begging Miss Stewart’s pardon, took aim and fired before Billy could even pull his trigger. Fastest draw I ever did see, bar none… Stand back, folks. Here comes the doctor.”
From his squatting position, holding the tourniquet, Ian saw the crowd form an aisle for the doctor who walked through and looked down.
“He’ll be all right, Mr. McCloud,” the doctor said. “If you’ll let me keep the tourniquet on him, I’ll take him down to my place and bandage him up proper.”
“Let him keep my bandanna,” Ian said, rising. “He got it bloody, so he can wash it.”
“That’s against my better judgment,” the doctor said. “We’ll be needing all the bandages we can get when Billy gets word of the shooting back to his pa… You folks had better boil out all the old scraps of linen or cotton you got and have them ready. The Avenging Angels will ride over this… Come on, Billy. I’ll treat you like I would a Christian, and you tell your pa I was good to you. You hear?”
As the doctor helped Billy to his feet, a small man with a large head, a black beard, and melancholy brown eyes intoned to the crowd, “Now, death and destruction from the Avenging Angels. Now, the dark saints will ride. Now is the time of woe. Woe to all Gentiles and this Hebrew.”
“Oh, hush up, Mr. Bernbaum,” Gabriella said to him in vexation. “You always look on the gloomy side of things. All Ian did was to shoot Mr. Peyton’s finger off.”
She had used, Ian noticed, the familiar address for him and the formal for Billy Peyton. Come Sunday, he might get more from the church meeting than a fast horse.
With Peyton blood still on his hands, Ian turned to the voice of Sheriff Faust. “Mr. McCloud, twice today you’ve done your Christian duty, bringing Will Trotter in and sending Billy Peyton out, but your last good deed might have been one too many. I’m taking the word of Gentile witnesses that the Mormon drew first, so I’m not bringing any charges against you. But I want you to understand that the law’s approval don’t mean the law’s protection. Before the Avenging Angels ride in, my advice to you is to ride out. Mormons don’t take kindly to being shot by Gentiles.”
“Who are the Avenging Angels, sheriff?” Ian asked.
“It’s a Mormon vigilante committee that protects them against us Gentiles, but sometimes the the committee gets a little overzealous about protecting.”
“How many vigilantes on that committee?”
“Six. Bryce Peyton and five of his hand-picked saints.”
“I ain’t worried.” Ian shrugged. “I carry a six-shooter.”
“If you’re bound and determined to stay here for the next stage, not much I can do but warn you. At least you’ll see a smiling face when you go out. Superintendent Peyton always smiles when he passes judgment.”
“If you feel the need to fortify your courage, son,” Mr. Bain said, “drinks are on the house over at my place, if you don’t mind drinking in the company of women.”
Behind Bain, Ian could see the soft oval of Gabriella’s face harden into disapproval.
“I appreciate your offer, Mr. Bain, but I done took the temperance oath.”
Gabriella stepped forward. “Ian, don’t listen to these calamity howlers and tempters. You’re safe, at least till Tuesday. Mr. Peyton won’t get to his father’s place before midnight, and Mormons don’t work on Sunday. Then they won’t meet till Monday to take a vote. You come in here with me and wash that blood off your hands.”
“Woe, woe unto Shoshone Flats,” Mr. Bernbaum intoned. “It is written, selah. Sodom shall be destroyed and with it all the Sodomites.”
Ian let himself be led into the restaurant. As she added more water to the kettle on the stove, Gabriella said, “Ian, using your own bandanna to stance Mr. Peyton’s blood was a magnanimous act.”
“I hope ‘magnanimous’ means something nice, Gabriella.”
“It does. Magnanimity was the old Roman ideal of behavior. A magnanimous man treats friend or foe with equal compassion. Besides, the way those people were talking, you’d think the Mormons were a bunch of scalawags. They just have the wrong religion, that’s all. Of course, Mr. Bryce Peyton hears voices, but, from all I hear, they’re reasonable voices. He says they’re his angels and he may be right. If the committee decides to hang you, it’ll be justice by their lights, and you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you died legally under their law.”
She was wrong, he thought, about his magnanimity. Something happened to his head when he took that tumble in the stagecoach. The old Johnny Loco would have killed his best friend over a girl, but Ian McCloud had let a stranger off with nothing more than a nipped finger. When he winged the Mormon, he had not been himself.
“Gabriella,” he said, as she fetched a washbasin, “seeing as how your escort won’t be able to make it to church tomorrow, I’d be right proud if you’d let me rent a rig and drive you to the meeting.”
“Why, Ian, I’d be pleased and honored,” she answered, blushing at the spontaneity of her reply. “You come out and have breakfast with mama and me. I’ll tell you how to get there, but if you should get lost, anyone in the valley can tell you how to get to Widow Stewart’s chicken ranch.”
“I’ll be there, ma’am washed and shaved.”
Something was definitely wrong with his head, he decided. If he had wanted a woman, he should not have waved Bain away when the saloon keeper came piling out of the barroom with four prime, crib-gnawing females already broke and gentled. So why, he wondered, was he planning to wash, shave, and hire a rig for a girl a man would have to court a week before holding her hand?
Ian had lost the answer long ago, in the whine of minié balls and the gut thrusts of bayonets. Violence had borne his gentleness away, but the being within, judging the man with abstract compassion, held him blameless. Ian could relearn gentleness, and the girl with the enigmatic name and delightful lilt to her breasts would be the outlaw’s teacher.
With the immaculate honesty of its kind, G-7 admitted to itself that Ian’s hormones, reinforcing its ancestral ardor, had led it to choose the girl, but in the matter of Gabriella Stewart, it and its host were functioning as a single entity.
3
From his second floor room in Taylor’s Hotel, Ian watched the shadows of the Tetons stretch eastward across the valley and fade into night as he listened to “Oh! Susanna,” with a dead sound in the middle D, tinkle up from a player piano in Bain’s Saloon across the street. Down there, where lamps were being lit, free whiskey awaited him, and he could hear the laughter of women, but he was avoiding company. In fact, he was standing well back from the window—no lamp would be lit in his room tonight—and the back of a chair was propped under the knob of the locked and bolted door to his room.
Yielding to a whim, he stood for a while watching the stars come out and tried to remember the names of the individual stars. He could remember the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and the Milky Way, but the only single star he knew by sight was the North Star, which he used to guide on when traveling after dark. He turned away from the window in disgust, not at his faulty memory but at himself for idling away his time tr
ying to remember things that didn’t really matter.
He spread a pallet on the floor at the foot of the bed, facing the door. If any of Billy Peyton’s friends who were familiar with the layout of the room fired through the door at a point where the sleeper should be, they would have had two chances to become bushwhackers, their first and their last.
From where he lay, finally, spread-eagled on the pallet, his pistol near his hand, he could see the stars through the window. In the reveries of beginning sleep, the Milky Way reminded him of the swash of freckles beneath the eyes of Gabriella, and the image arrested his glide into somnolence. Impatiently he brushed the vision from his mind, vaguely disturbed by the turns his thoughts were taking. Here he lay, moping over stars and a girl, when he should have been thinking about a fast horse, a bank, and about getting out of Shoshone Flats before a passel of angry Mormons came swarming out of the lower valley.
Ian slept.
G-7 never slept. Now it took a long-delayed opportunity to evaluate the data which had been pouring into its host all day to reflect on its growing knowledge of man. There was very much planning to be done.
The scout was aware of strange, bug-eyed monsters slithering in the depth of space. It remembered the snails on the eighteenth planet of Vega spewing venom before them to grease their paths with carrion. G-7 had individually converted the hookfangs of Vulpecula 8 who used torture as a religious ritual, but it had met no species comparable to the humans of sun 3 who had learned to walk upright in order to use their forelegs for maiming and destroying their own and other species.
Yet the scout was not completely overcome with revulsion. Objectivity was a gift of its ethereality, and experience had taught it versatility. It had to admit that this organism was superbly conditioned to its environment, and G-7 was accustomed to working with whatever material was at hand. Nothing in its code condoned the willful destruction or impairment of energy systems, but, on the other hand, it knew that sometimes good could be the final goal of ill.
This superb engine of destruction, Ian McCloud, could never be driven to light, never directly led—G-7 had fissioned an ion to prevent the murder of Billy Peyton—only nudged toward goodness at an oblique angle. G-7 faced the problem head-on; man was simply not a light-seeking animal and its chosen specimen was even less so. As it nudged Ian toward righteousness, it would have to keep the man’s eyes averted. Metaphysically speaking, the light from a single candle might prove a blinding glare to Ian McCloud.
To train the man to lead the human race, it would first be necessary to persuade McCloud to join the human race while making full use of his genius for violence which elevated him above a species which evinced merely a general talent for mayhem.
By now, G-7 had spotted areas in the social order of human beings where a man of McCloud’s inclinations might function, if not with virtue at least with legality, particularly if that man, as in the case of Bryce Peyton, had an angel to blame for his errors. G-7 was intrigued by the Mormon concept of angels, and it sensed that McCloud, with his forcibleness, might be the ideal instrument for bringing the opposing religious factions in the valley together and for lighting a flame in this small town which might someday illuminate the entire planet.
Gabriella might assist G-7 in placing the outlaw onto a path toward legality, particularly if she were favorably impressed by tomorrow’s spooning, and G-7 was already determined to add its bit to the preservice festivities—purely for self-educational purposes. G-7 had deduced a working knowledge of the species reproductive methods from McCloud’s fantasies in the restaurant, but it needed practical experience and its own curiosity had been aroused by the girl. When she walked, the middle part of her swayed with the lightness of a wavering luminosity, and there was an evanescence in the perky uplift of her breasts…
G-7’s host stirred and twitched, and the being quickly withdrew a strumming tendril from a sensitive area of the man’s thalamus.
With Ian quieted, G-7 considered a paradox.
On a planet of such limitless energy, romance and fertilization should have been combined into a single spontaneity of blithe and unpremeditated art. The impulse toward union was so strong in McCloud that he would have been the crown prince of pollinators on a sexually liberated planet such as Vulvula, but McCloud had been strangely timid around the female. G-7 had encouraged the man to be polite to the woman because politeness toward women was a part of the law-abiding syndrome, but it had not expected such powerful constraint, particularly around a female who literally burned to be ravished by him.
The woman’s attitudes confused G-7 even more. Her flesh was willing, but her spirit was weak. She had leaped at the opportunity to go to church with a wayfaring stranger, not out of concern for the wayfarer’s spiritual welfare, as she so piously told herself, but from a covert yearning for the stranger’s body. Why covert, it wondered. Why deny love, the first law of the universe? It was written that the chalice of love should never be lidded by piety, for that, in the Code, was hypocrisy.
G-7 would explore the enigma of womankind more fully tomorrow. Tonight it would explore the mind of its host and alleviate the man’s obsession with revenge. Swinging webs over dendrites, nets between lacunae, G-7 flagellated a cluster of neurons at the base of Ian’s thalamus and waited to seine for his dreams.
Along well-worn neutral paths the dreams came. In clarity and with realism, Ian hunkered again in the shadows of a moonlit ravine to hear a tall, thin man in a gray uniform on a gray horse mouth again the insult which sent the sleeper into paroxysms of dream rage so violent the words were unintelligible to G-7.
The sleeper stirred and G-7 withdrew its tracers. The clue to the man’s obsession was locked securely in his subconscious. To soothe the sleeper’s unease, G-7 stroked the area of pleasant dreams and conjured up a vision of Gabriella.
Immediately, Ian was back in his old ravine, this time with the seraphic form of Gabriella standing approvingly behind him as he pumped bullet after bullet from a magic pistol into the skeletal form of Colonel Blicket, which writhed and grimaced but did not fall. Delighted by his magic weapon, Ian fired ten, twelve, eighteen…
He bolted awake, grabbing his pistol, as a volley of revolver shots sounded from the street. Even as his grip settled on the pistol’s handle, Ian relaxed. Some of the boys were bidding Sheriff Faust a good night as they galloped past his office riding home from the saloon, firing their pistols in defiance of the posted order not to fire weapons inside the town limits.
Ian rolled over and went back to sleep, thinking that the sheriff had erred in posting an ordinance with the word “please” in it. Western folks sometimes took politeness as a sign of weakness, particularly young buckaroos like Billy Peyton.
Morning brought a misting rain. Driving south in a rented buggy toward the widow’s ranch, Ian enjoyed the snugness and comfort of the enclosed vehicle and found himself looking forward to seeing Gabriella in her Sunday finery. If it weren’t for the long hours and low pay, he thought, it might be pleasant to be a law-abiding citizen.
Widow Stewart’s ranch house was a frame building with a vine-shaded front porch standing near the bluff of a cottonwood—bordered ravine. Besides the ordinary appurtenances of a ranch house—stable, corral, pump house, privy, washpot, and clothesline—a row of hen houses sat twenty yards behind the house in a chicken yard. When Ian knocked, the Widow Stewart answered the door.
Aproned and smiling, she beckoned him in, saying, “Welcome, Ian McCloud. Daughter’s still primping. She’ll be in the parlor directly, and I’d like to tell you, now, you’ve made an impression on that girl, and her mother’s not so old she can’t see why.”
Widow Stewart must have had her daughter while still very young, and Ian wasn’t so old he couldn’t see why. Her high-piled hair was dark and wavy, with pink ears protruding below. Her skin was fairer than Gabriella’s with no freckles marring its whiteness. Though no taller than Gabriella, she was wider, except around the waist, and much thicker in places. Her
bubbling speech matched her figure. As she took Ian’s hat to hang on the coat tree, she bubbled fore and aft.
Whirling to face him again, in several disparate but enchantingly liquid movements, she said, “Have a seat and make yourself comfortable. Do you like your eggs scrambled or fried? One thing we have here is fresh eggs. Folks say the only way to get fresher eggs than the Widow Stewart’s is to lay them yourself.”
“Scrambled will be fine, ma’am.”
“I scramble them with a little cream to give them lightness, and I can drop in some chopped green onions to give them a he-man flavor.”
“Just the cream, ma’am. I don’t want any man flavor spoiling a hen’s eggs.”
She threw him a sidelong, coquettish smile, and said, “You sound appreciative, Ian. They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and maybe that’s true for both sexes, one way or the other.”
Turning with a wide swing to her well-rounded bottom, she bubbled into the kitchen.
G-7 was overwhelmed by the widow’s voluptuousness, vivacity, and contrasting colors, but there was a quality to the woman, observed and dismissed by Ian with maddening superficiality, that almost sent G-7 into a flux; Mrs. Stewart had about her an aura of waiting and wanting, like the plowed loam of springtime, a quality which though apart from her beauty, reinforced it like the pauses in music.
Nothing cowardly or hypocritical impeded the flow of the widow’s love system. Through the fibers of its host, G-7 had felt the woman’s pull, and, more than its host, it appreciated the electromagnetic vortices swirling around breast gravities whose amplitudes left Ian unstirred. Perhaps McCloud, because of his professional reliance on fast horses, was more appreciative of lean flanks, G-7 mused, whereas itself, a star rover, was more aesthetically aware of world lines. Whatever the cause, it was apparent to G-7 that on this planet it was a breast angel while its host was a thigh man.
“Good morning, Ian.”
