“Are you alright?” the Rider asked, when the fit had subsided somewhat.
The man held up a hand and dabbed at his mouth, then returned the freshly bloodied handkerchief to his pocket.
“Excuse me. I think we started off on the wrong foot, friend,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat with a rumble, smiled and ran his hand again through his hair, returning it to its former austerity. “John Holliday. My friends call me Doc.”
“Rider,” the Rider said. He offered his hand, but Doc shook his head.
“You’ll pardon me if I don’t. I’m a card carrying member of the esteemed Las Vegas Lungers and Hackers Club,” he smiled thinly. “Unless you’re applying for membership, you’d best hold off on the pleasantries until I’ve been to a washbasin.”
“Lungers and…?”
“I’m a consumptive, Mr. Rider. It’s what brings me to this arid clime.”
“I see,” the Rider said. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh I’m still spry enough,” said Doc. “My condition put a damper on my dental practice to be sure, but I’m a saloonist now, so no harm done.”
“You were a dentist.”
“Till a few months ago,” he said. “And what’s your line, Mr. Rider?”
“I’m a bookseller,” the Rider answered.
Doc’s eyes took in the Rider’s scarred face and hands.
“Pardon my asking, but where does a bookseller get scars like those?”
The Rider shifted uncomfortably under Doc’s gaze, and put his hands in his pockets.
“Paper cuts,” he said without smiling.
Doc chuckled.
“Well, unless you’ve some Spanish volumes in your baggage, I don’t know how much of a readership you’re going to find in Las Vegas. The indigent literati are almost without exception Spaniards. There are a few Greeks in New Town, but the Galinas is something of an illiteracy demarcation line. Everyone to the east of it is far more concerned with numbers than they are with letters. Are you a sportsman, Mr. Rider?”
“I’m afraid not,” the Rider answered, somewhat bemused by the consumptive’s open manner. They’d not said word one to each other since the Rider had got on the train at Tombstone, but the man was talking a blue streak now, a lonesome soul brimming over to a captive ear.
“Don’t be afraid, Mr. Rider. They can smell it,” Doc said, gesturing to the other passengers, who had returned to their business, mainly staring vacantly out the yellowed windows. “I took you for a sporting man by the…forgive me, splendor of your ornamentation.” He nodded to the gilded handle of the Rider’s pistol. “Tell me, what’s your book about?”
“Oh, poetry,” he said. “Ever heard of Pindar?”
“No,” Doc admitted. “You ever hear this one?
Little Bo Peep
Could not sleep
But coughed the whole night through
She scattered her bugs
All over the rugs
Now her sheep have TB too.”
Doc chuckled and looked at him.
“What did you think of that, Mr. Rider?”
“Very good,” the Rider said, smiling indulgently.
Doc smirked.
“Well, Mr. Rider, if you liked that, then I don’t think I would care for your Pindar much at all.”
The Rider stared a moment, then laughed, a genuine, appreciative laugh. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done so.
“You’re alright, Mr. Rider,” Doc observed, leaning his head back against the seat for a moment and closing his eyes. “You’re alright.”
The train gave a particularly severe lurch that caused several of the passengers to exclaim, and one or two who had been dozing to fall bodily from their seats. The brakes hissed, and metal squealed, and the oil swished in the bellies of the lamps.
“We’ve stopped,” the Rider observed, craning his neck to look out the window.
“That we have,” Doc sighed, not opening his eyes.
There were loud voices outside, punctuated by snaps of gunfire that set the women screaming. The conductor trotted the length of the car and disappeared out the front door.
The Rider tensed, but Doc’s hand touched the crook of his elbow and he turned to him.
“Remain calm, sir, and in your seat,” he whispered.
The car door burst open and the conductor who had previously departed through it, re-entered on his back, his nose gushing bright blood. More screaming, and a few of the men rose in alarm as a barrel-chested figure straining against the buttons of a long duster and wearing a flour sack mask over his face and a battered wide hat on top entered. He stepped over the writhing train man, a .45 in one gloved hand, and two drooping burlap bags in the other.
“Siddown!” he hollered through the sack, waving his pistol.
Those who had risen plopped quickly back down.
“Y’all stand and deliver!” he commanded in a deep voice. “I’m goin’ to pass this bag down the rows. All you good church goin’ folks ought to know what I expect. All you non-believers look on and learn, or I’ll settle your doubts right quick!”
The man threw the bag into the face of a well-dressed Mexican man seated to his right, and tossed the other at the feet of an old woman to his left, so that she had to scramble for it. He guffawed, the bag puffing in and out over his mouth.
“I want every doodad and dollar! I’m goin’ to walk to the end of the car and wait till the count of thirty. If them bags ain’t come to me full up by then I’m just goin’ to start drillin’ the backs of your damned skulls!”
There were shrieks at this, and the masked man stalked down the aisle. The spurs on his dusty boots rang as he tread, and the broad cuffs of his dirt-caked chapaderos flapped.
Beside the Rider, Doc slid his hat onto his head and tugged the brim low, settling down into the seat.
He heard similar shouting from the other cars, and once, another muffled bang of gunfire.
There was movement outside the window, and another masked man on a speckled grey horse went galloping for the back of the wheezing train.
“You’re holdin’ onto that case pretty tight, mister. Whatcha got in there?”
The Rider looked, and saw that the bandit had paused over a smallish, silver haired man in a pinstripe suit.
“Please. Just…just papers,” the passenger said in a Spanish accent.
In a minute, the bigger man had snatched a black leather valise from the man’s lap and popped it open. He peered into its depths and gave a long whistle.
“Papers, huh? I’d say.”
He jammed the valise up under his arm and walked away, a noticeable spring in his step.
The silver haired man looked over his shoulder, and the Rider saw a drawn, dark face, round spectacles magnifying a pair of terrified eyes over the bridge of a long, thin nose.
The bandit sauntered past, bathing the Rider in a wave of spicy, unwashed odor, then stopped and doubled back, looking down at them from the holes in his mask. The Rider glanced up and noticed that the ‘O’ in the word ‘flour’ stamped haphazardly on the sack perfectly encircled the man’s left eye, and the upside down ‘U’ spanned his nose like the bridgework on a pair of spectacles.
“What in the hell are you supposed to be?” the man demanded.
The Rider looked straight ahead.
“I’m talkin’ to you, buster,” he said, poking the Rider in the shoulder with the barrel of his .45.
The Rider looked up at him.
“You’re about the silliest lookin’ sonofabitch I ever seen,” said the robber. “Between that beard and them pigtails, looks like you can’t decide whether to piss standin’ up or sittin’ down.”
The woman in the seat in front of the Rider turned and held the swollen, tinkling bag over her shoulder with one trembling hand.
The Rider stared into the holes of the sack, at the two bright eyes glaring out at him.
“Well?” the bandit asked, not blinking. “You goin’ to take that bag, Pigtail
s?”
The Rider said nothing. He could do nothing, though he had a great desire to shoot this man, if not kill him. He was abominably tired. Lilith’s invisible ruahim still kept him up most nights, and his frayed nerves left him with little patience for men of this sort.
He reached out and took the bag, fully prepared to part with the meager cash left in his billfold.
The robber’s free hand came down and clamped on his wrist. The touch of the man boiled his blood.
The man turned his hand, and the silver ward ring on his finger glinted in the lamp light.
“What’s that there?”
“Let me go,” the Rider hissed.
“Sure, I’ll let you go, Pigtails,” the man said, releasing his wrist and leaving streaks of white and red across his skin. “You just be sure and drop your wedding band in that sack.”
“No,” the Rider said.
The robber thumbed back the hammer on his pistol. The woman in front of the Rider pressed her lace-gloved hands to her ears and hunkered down in her seat.
“I didn’t hear you.”
The Rider’s eyes went from the mask to the dark hole of the man’s gun barrel. He could almost imagine the blunt nose of the bullet waiting to spring at the end of it. His eyes went out of focus for a second, and he considered dying. He had no fear of it, having already seen much of the country that lay beyond. He was a man with the assurance of continued existence and long experience with out of body travel. No need for the faith most men had to falter through their days with, the Rider knew what to expect.
His regularly interrupted sleep had left him with a ragged edge, as well. He was constantly tired, and could see no end to his condition in sight. Indeed, it seemed to worsen. His food and drink had begun to taste bad, and he did not like to think what the ruahim must be doing to it.
Why not just die and be done with it, then? Let his brains get splattered over the sickly dentist. Let him fly from this world of rot, assume his garb of glory and take his place in the halls of the Yeshiva shel Malah in the precincts of the learned in shel Elyon, studying Torah under the wise angel Zagazagel with all the great sages and his departed friends and teachers of The Sons of The Essenes. Each day would be a full life with a morning of joyful childhood, a blazing afternoon at the summit of youth, and an evening of peaceful, measured adulthood. No more slow, dragging years of creeping age, no more restless nights of dwelling on the long, drawn out expiration, the dilapidation and failure of body and mind that waited at the precipice of a hard mortal life. It was a sure temptation, one that his teachers had warned him of early on.
They told him that anticipation of death was God’s test for men of hidden knowledge, and the Adversary’s greatest temptation. The counterpoint was that although God had laid aside an idyllic place for them, they must not abandon life. Life was the crucible of the Lord, in which the spirit was tempered for the unknown rigors of its new existence. To cut it short was to impede one’s enjoyment of the life yet to come.
One old teacher, a rebbe named Levi, had advised him that the trick was finding one thing, just one, to savor about the material world; something that could only be enjoyed in this life. Something one would dearly miss in the next. Levi had confided to the Rider that for him, it was strawberries. Plump, freshly picked strawberries.
The Rider’s one thing had always been knowledge, and experience of this Earth. He had as a youth marveled at the breadth of Creation and the philosophies of men. But that simple joy had lately been replaced with an altogether different motivation to stay alive.
At the end of the bandit’s gun barrel was the shadow of Adon, lurking and leering in the dark with the blood of the Sons of The Essenes black on his hands. The Order had taken the Rider from a mindless job as an apprentice shopkeeper sweeping floors, balancing ledgers and putting his mind to the arrangement of canned goods and opened up the world, the very universe to him. They had taken away his fear of death.
Adon had no small part in that, and it was that personal betrayal that aggrieved him all the more. Shopkeeper his real father may have been, small and profit-minded, but he had loved the Torah enough to sacrifice his legacy and, like Abraham, give his only son over to its study when the Sons of The Essenes came calling. In the years that followed, Adon had come to replace his father. The Rider respected and deferred to him at all times, trusting him with the idolizing love of a boy with no other family. When his clerk father died, he had barely shed a tear. When he returned from the war and learned of Adon’s utter, murderous betrayal, he had hardly been able to stand up under the weight of grief and shame. No, Adon had to answer for that. And so the Rider had to live.
“You heard him fine, Dirty Dave,” said Doc quietly at his side.
The bandit’s attention turned to the dentist.
“Doc,” said the robber, recognition flooding his blinking eyes.
“Why don’t you give this man a pass, Dirty? He’s with me.”
“I don’t give passes, I give bullets. Say my name again and I’ll give you one, lunger.” He turned his gun on Doc.
“Don’t tease me, you piece of trash,” Doc warned, iron in his voice, as if he had it in his hand to match.
The back door of the car clashed open and the Rider heard heavy boot steps and more spurs.
“What the hell’s goin’ on in here?” It was a squirrely voice, muffled. “How come you ain’t grabbed none of the lanterns?”
Dirty, the bandit, stood where he was.
“Lanterns. Get the goddamned lanterns yourself.”
“Son of a bitch!” the other man said.
“Get the other bag,” Dirty said to his cohort, and in a minute the second masked man came into view, a tall, gangly fellow with a row of extinguished train lanterns looped and clanking over one skinny arm. He went across the aisle to jerk the other bulging loot bag from an old man’s hands.
“You just reach in your coat Doc, two fingers, and pass me that underarm gun.”
“What do you intend?”
“I intend to leave peaceably, but I ain’t about to turn my back on you.”
Doc did as he was told, producing a little nickel plated Colt Lightning with a four inch barrel. He flipped it lightly and held it butt-first to Dirty.
“You know I’ll be comin’ back for it,” Doc said as the man took it and slid it into his coat pocket.
“I guess you know where it’ll be,” said the other.
The Rider turned his attention to the second man, who was looking out one of the windows.
“Let’s go already!” he whined over his shoulder.
Dirty snatched the burlap bag of loot from the Rider and dropped the black case he’d taken inside. He was about to turn away when something caught his eye and he stopped again.
“Hold everything,” he said.
He reached down and grabbed the butt of the Rider’s Volcanic pistol and drew it out of it’s holster.
He whistled, holding it up to the light.
“Look at this here!” he exclaimed, the smile nearly showing through his mask. He held the golden pistol with its intricate mystic engravings up for the other robber to see.
“Take it and let’s go!” said the other man, who was by now at the front of the car.
The Rider watched the Volcanic go into the sack with the black valise, watches, and jewelry. It was irreplaceable, the product of weeks of meticulous engraving and precise astrological preparation. The rosette token of Nehema protected him from demons, but the pistol was his greatest offensive tool. He felt his stomach sink.
Doc seemed to see it in his eyes, and he touched the Rider reassuringly on the arm again as Dirty turned away and went after his companion.
The second man went stumbling out of the car, berating Dirty as he went. For his part, Dirty paused in the doorway and waved his pistol at the shadowy passengers.
“Hope y’all like Las Vegas, folks!” he laughed, and then he sent one bullet screaming down the center of the aisle, thunderous in th
e closeness. When the flash of his gun muzzle had subsided on their corneas, he was gone, the door slamming shut behind him.
People were screaming and scrambling for cover.
The Rider looked out the window, and saw Dirty and his accomplice clamber down the train steps to a pair of waiting horses, being held by a third man.
The masked rider they had seen gallop for the back of the train returned, and he was an eerie sight, for bouncing in his fist were a gaggle of red brakeman’s lanterns, glowing hellish and strange in the blue light. When he joined the others, his burden cast them all in a scarlet glow.
“One, two, three, four,” Doc counted, mimicking a pistol with his thumb and forefinger against the glass and tapping each man out.
Another pair of masked riders joined the bunch from other parts of the train. The Rider noticed they were all bearing various signal lanterns.
Doc counted them as they came.
“Five, six. Dirty Dave Rudabaugh, Frank Cady, Slap Jack Bill, maybe Bullshit Jack Pierce, and two others.”
“You know those men?”
“I have the displeasure of having made some of their acquaintances, yes,” said Doc. “Dave Rudabaugh is a friend of a friend, but despite the old axiom, that does not make him one of mine.”
“That pistol was dear to me,” the Rider said.
“A pistol is dear to most men in these parts. If you’ll accompany me when we reach Las Vegas, I may be able to get yours back for you. Barring that, I shall find you a suitable replacement followed by swift satisfaction for both our losses.”
“I don’t have much choice, do I?”
“Choice was God’s second gift to man, Mr. Rider. A man may choose most anything in his life. His occupation for instance, or rather what he lets out his occupation to be.”
“Do you mean to say you’re not a dentist?”
“No you misunderstand. I am a dentist. But you’re no more a bookseller than I am the Prince of Wales. What use has a bookseller for a pistol and a knife?”
The Rider shrugged.
Merkabah Rider: The Mensch With No Name Page 8
