* * *
Downwind and upriver of the trapper's territory, there's a pack of company men with a bag of sugar and a bag of tea, a pile of pelts tied to horseback, the riders chewed over by the tilted teeth of the mountains. Each green cliff glints with ghosts, and each new place is written on a map of the men's making.
Silk has not yet taken over the world. It's the trappers’ mission to bring back fur and carry it into drawing rooms where the pianos are made of wood from other conquered places. At night the men circle, make their fire, boil the river, steep tea leaves, drink it hot and sweet, the only rightness, their ragged remnant of civilization. It's a strange civilizer, the drinking of brackish water.
They write journals of their expedition into forbidden country: caverns narrow and full of black wings, pine trees sharp as knives pressed into soft bellies. Each man has his spoon. Each man has something gold hanging under his shirt. If they chisel into the stone they find only dark muddy green, stone the color of swamp, no emeralds. Above them, mountain lions stalk the white bone knobs at the back of each man's neck.
One of the men's got a monkey with him, the only source of comedy, brought from his lady at home, and he sets his monkey off into the woods. The monkey chitters high and holy, telling him where the beavers are building their dams. That trapper comes back rich in oily pelts, the decapitated heads of beaver strewn on the path behind him, ghost tails slapping the water while the men sleep.
One day a woman appears at the edge of their camp. She carries two pistols and wears trousers made of leather. Her eyes have tattoos of treelines along the lids.
Call her the Hunter.
With her is the French Canadian freetrapper, whose legend the men all know. He's the Bluebeard of the Rocky Mountains, and his tales travel, but something's wrong with him. He rides on the back of her horse, sidesaddle. He sucks at the insides of his cheeks, spits in the dirt, and bows his head. He wears a brilliant blue blanket around his shoulders and shivers, even when he's near the fire. His beard's gone half white.
The trappers decide he's no longer a man. Something's gone wrong, and whatever it is, they won't ask. They decide never to speak of him again. Bad luck.
“What are you doing here?” the leader of the company men asks the woman. “What are you hunting?”
He's already given her all the tobacco they've brought, though he doesn't know why.
“What do you think I'm hunting?” she asks. “Don't you know where you are? What do you call these mountains?”
They tell her their name for them, and she laughs. “That's not their name. I've been following them around the center of the world. I've been hunting a long time.
“Let me tell you a story,” she says.
The men carefully fail to listen. The only stories to tell nine months into a trapping are about women, not by them. Girls on their backs, girls on horseback, girls in horsehair. No man wants to risk drawing the attention of his own ghosts, not this far in. The longer they travel in this country, the more fear travels with them. The women in these mountains are dangerous if they exist at all, and the men pretend they don't, in favor of the few women working up in the gold veins and silver valleys outside the tourmaline range. The men make progress toward them, gathering pelts for payment at bars and brothels.
The story the Hunter tells them is something about a magical creature in the trees, left here by an earlier expedition, offloaded from a wagon, and chained in a room made of metal out in the woods, all alone.
“I ran up on the last man from that expedition, and he told me they put their monster where nobody would ever find it,” she says, and the men shudder.
“Next time I saw him, he was turned innards out,” she says, “and hanging from a tree. He was missing all his mains. So I guess they didn't cage it well enough, now, did they? You haven't seen it?”
They haven't seen it.
When she rides away, the freetrapper looks back at them, and they pretend not to notice. All is well. Pelts and then home.
One morning, though, the men come upon a gathering of the dead, skeletons sitting in a circle, drinking tea. Cups shattered in the snow, gilt-edged smiles, brown stains in the ice. All the dead are dressed in furs, layer after layer of them, beaver, bear, and wolf. The skeletons are wearing the claws of the animals, the teeth of the animals, the tails of the animals.
The monkey leaps from its man's shoulder and runs to one of the dead. It shrieks in recognition.
One of the living men kneels beside one of the skeletons and touches the skull with his fingernail, tapping it. With that touch the skeleton blooms, regaining all its lost flesh, young and strong and fat with feasting. It is a body full of brilliant blood. It is a familiar body. Each man sees himself there, and shudders in time, himself living, himself dead, all in the same moment.
There's a whipping wind now, and hailstones. The fire rekindles in green flames, and there is a voice, and the voice tells them to eat.
There is the Hunter with the trees tattooed on her eyelids too, but she doesn't arrive until somewhat later, and by then the thing she's hunting is gone.
* * *
What do we hunt but each other? A hunter might go on an expedition, might map the forest and mountains, but what they're truly looking for is their own broken heart hidden inside an elk, their own lost lover hidden inside a wolf, their own dead child hidden inside a bear. A hunter is always looking for wishes to come true, and if it takes blood and rending to get them, then it does. There is a magic in the explosion, in the black smoke cloud, in the way whatever one is hunting runs off, the way the hunter is left standing there, inhaling powder.
All most people wish for is more, wishing forever until tongues are parched and hearts are tired of beating. Love is a kind of wish.
Wishing for love is the same as wishing for more wishes.
* * *
Snap forward in time again, a hundred and fifty years. Now there's a pawnshop down a dirt trail, deep in the woods, near the spot where the trappers died.
There's a man named Yoth Begail behind the counter, scraggle jaw and white yellow beard, tin of chew in his front pocket and stretched tendons in his neck giving him the look of a scarecrow gone sentient. There's pawned-off precious in the glass cases, dust on everything thick enough to epic it. These are the gun hoards of suicides from the local police repo, snuck out by janitors looking to buy other things, trading them over to Yoth Begail for the time being, taking his cash off to dealers and alimonies.
Yoth's been out here sixty-five years, give or take. Pawnshops are robber beacons, and people come in a couple times a year to gunpoint Yoth, who pulls his own weapon from undercounter, no hesitation. Yoth's got no town rules to live by. He sells things no one else can sell.
Got a case of stones brought in by the woman out near the reactor. Bunch of folks that way went to heaven and left their blood behind, crystalized into little geodes, and the woman, only one still out there, has been selling them for years. They left bones that look like milk opal too, centered with garnet marrow, and Yoth's got some of those as well. The woman tried to sell him a skull, but he didn't want that glittering thing around, the stony brain visible inside the opal casing. All of it was like to get him sick. Rest of the stones out here are hunks of green tourmaline, but the muddy kind, and tourmaline is rough luck.
Oh, Yoth's got the usual pawn glories too. All the things people come to him to forget. He's like a confessor in that way. Bingo-bought prizes and family heirlooms, forlorn valuables traded for canned-good grocery dollars. Pearl necklaces bought in Tahiti on the only vacation, engagement rings wrung off arthritic fingers. Televisions and trophies, couple of gold bars somebody brought in from a hoard, pennies on the dollar, ’cause you can't spend gold at the Walmart. He's got a gun-shop license, and he can sell whatever he wants to anybody he likes. These guns have been used to kill all kinds of things: animals, trespassers, ownselves.
Up high on the wall there's a glass case containing Yoth's best rifle
. It's a black-powder model, so in federal terms it's not even a firearm. It can be sold to anyone, held by anyone. Black powder doesn't need a license. When Yoth's in the mood, he turns out the lights in the pawn, drinks a beer, and lets the rifle shine. Under the fluorescents it looks like any old firearm, dents and pits, but it came with weird copper-cased bullets, and the bullets are hot to the touch, even now, unfired since the 1800s.
Or rather, fired only once, by Yoth himself, and he got what he needed.
It's not for sale, but the pawn ticket's out there still. Brought in by a young woman with tattoos on her eyelids, who said there was no place out far enough that she could be sure people wouldn't find it, so she was entrusting it to Yoth Begail and his pawn palace for the time being.
“Welp,” said Yoth, who was familiar with people trying to keep their fingers on their valuables from afar. “I'll take it off your hands then, ma’am.”
“You have to keep it safe,” she said. “It's a damned old thing and it's been in some trouble.”
“Nothing's damned without it's had human hands on it,” Yoth said. “That's just a black-powder rifle. It's the man with bad aim that's the problem.”
“So you say,” she said. “But you'd be wrong. I'll be back for it. I haven't slept in a while, and it's that thing's fault. Every so often I need a rest bad. There has to be a bargain made.”
Yoth considered that. He was a young man then, and he thought for a moment he could consider a wife like her, if he'd consider any wife, but in her stare he saw nothing he liked. Woman looked like a wild dog, and when she shut her eyes she looked like a rattler. She was wearing clothes so old you'd have thought she lived in a cave, and she had white fur draped around her shoulders, fur of some animal he didn't know. Leather pants so filthy she might've been an animal from the waist down.
“You a hunter, then?” he asked.
“Am that,” she said. “Been hunting in these woods years now. Trapping too.”
“Why haven't I seen you before?” asked Yoth. She couldn't have been much older than he was.
“I was out a long time, this last one,” she said. “Years. Got any tobacco? Can't smoke when I'm hunting these.”
“Animals don't care,” said Yoth, passing her a cigarette, lighting it for her. This was before he took to chewing, safer in a pawnshop.
She looked at him and laughed. “What I'm hunting likes the smoke. If I smoked, it'd find me before I'm ready to be found.”
The tattoos on her eyelids were faint enough to be scars, but Yoth could tell someone had inked them in. Treelines on top of the mountains out here, recognizable peaks. A map. He looked at them secretly as he wrote out her pawn ticket.
“You keep that rifle for me,” she said. “I'll be back. Don't fire it unless you want to call up trouble.”
He peered out the window to watch her go. She was on horseback, the horse draped in an unlikely blanket the color of bluebells, a piebald black-and-white mane. Her mount moved like someone dragged up out of an armchair to dance to a song he'd never heard before. There was a little monkey in a vest sitting on the back of the saddle. The woman, the horse, and the monkey disappeared into the trees, and not long after that, snow piled up against his windows. Time he managed to dig himself out, Yoth Begail had decided to forget about the strange tracks her horse had left, nothing like hooves.
That was sixty years ago. Yoth keeps the glass of the case clear and the rifle oiled, but otherwise he leaves it alone. It's loaded, unlike the rest of the pawnshop guns. It's always been loaded. He took the bullets out once and held them, but he got a terrible feeling, and when he put them back in, there were burns on his palms. They took weeks to heal. That time he went to a doctor, who gave him some goat-shit-smelling ointment and told him not to play with matches.
At night he can hear singing coming from inside the rifle case, but he's no fool. He's not tempted.
Yoth's four drinks into the dark when the Kid comes through the front door, slipping in without ringing the bell, loping over to the desk where Yoth is sitting. The Kid says, “Old man, give me your best shooter.”
“You're not old enough to own a gun,” says Yoth. “I only sell to people old enough to aim.”
“I'm older than I look,” says the Kid. “And I'm not what you think. I want me some magic.”
Yoth eyes him.
“Mind out of here now, kid,” says Yoth. “I got the right to refuse service.”
Yoth Begail is eighty-six years old when the Kid steals the rifle off the wall of the pawn palace and shoots him dead.
* * *
The Hunter wakes with a start in the middle of a blizzard, her cave filled with gray light. She's been sleeping a long time. Her hand is clenched around a slip of paper, and her mouth is dry.
Her heart starts up again, and she waits as blood circulates through her body, locks opening to let salmon through. Now the fish are running, red and pink and silver, bright fish in a bright river. Her horse is there in the entrance of the cave, his blue blanket over him, his mane whiter than it was when she was last awake. She shoves her boots on. The cave is lighter now, and icicles fall from the entrance, spearing the snow, cracking and groaning as they give themselves over to water again. Outside, flowers explode. The Hunter stretches her arms and checks her weapon. Her pawn ticket is still legible.
“Up, horse,” she says, and the horse stands and shakes himself. She straightens his blanket. “Up, monkey,” the Hunter says, and the monkey comes out of the saddlebag and looks around, eyes shining.
“It's hunting season,” she says.
* * *
Another story from the history of the rifle: Yoth Begail fired this rifle just once, twenty years after he received it, into a stick-’em-up who'd opened the door of the pawnshop while Yoth was on the can. He grabbed the rifle without thinking, and pulled the trigger into the robber.
By then Yoth was forty years old and in love with the priest from down in the river valley, the one who traveled cabin to cabin spreading God like margarine.
Yoth had his own secrets, and his own once-a-year trip away from the woods to a city where there were bars to drink in and men to drink to, even if he had no way with words. Sometimes he opened his register and looked at the ticket and wondered if the Hunter was ever coming back. Yoth was starting not to sleep for thinking of the black-powder rifle, worrying that someone would steal it, and he wondered if what she'd told him was true, if it was the thing's fault, or if that was just his mind running wild.
The priest — let us call him the Priest, in the tradition of this kind of story — came to the pawnshop one day in spring and knocked on the door. When Yoth opened it, he was startled. Man of God. There was no God out here. That was why he was in the woods. There was only the new reactor, fenced and barbed-wired, patrolled by trucks, and the old places, the missionary buildings going to crumble now, nobody worshipping in them anymore. Hunters holed up eating beef jerky in the wood churches these days, pine needles and pitch, rabbit bones splintered beneath the sign of the cross. Piss graffiti on the walls. Yoth himself had spent some time with a smoke-jumper in one of those shacks, before he stopped that sort of thing cold. Mob of neighbors at the pawn, that was what his kind of love led to, and he didn't want it.
“Heard tell you were up here alone, Yoth Begail,” said the Priest, and smiled. He was a rangy man a little younger than Yoth, wearing a string tie and a black suit and holding a Bible in his hand. His face had an openness normally found in fools, but there it was, on him, a man with a clean shave, nicked jaw, and eyes that showed evidence of a history other than prayer.
“Am that,” said Yoth.
“Heard you might be looking for the Lord?”
“Heard wrong,” said Yoth, who could hardly speak. His throat had a lump big as a cocoon in it, and he had no idea what wanted to emerge. Words he'd never say. “You're new out here,” he said instead.
“I came from Missouri,” the Priest said, with palpable awe. “On a
train. I'm the new man of God out here.”
“You are that,” said Yoth. “Got a name?”
The Priest blushed from beneath his collar, his face heating to the color of a coal in a woodstove. Yoth felt himself blushing too, but he was in the shadow.
“I'm Weran Root. Not ‘the Priest.’ I don't know why I said that. This is my first assignment. I've never been to a place like this before. It's far between people. I've been walking this mountain since yesterday looking for you.”
Weran Root came in uninvited and sat down at the jewelry case, gazing in at twenty years of Sunday best. He picked up a red stone and held it to the light.
“What kind of gem is this?”
“It's from when the reactor melted down,” Yoth tells him. “Twenty years ago. All over the news. You remember.”
Yoth could hear singing coming from the rifle. The jangling noise of a wedding in the wood, a charivari. Coins thrown into the apron of a bride, groom lifted and shaken upside down, laughter, fiddles and howls, whistles and shrieks of ecstasy. He tried to ignore it.
“What's that on the radio?” Weran Root said. It was a Sunday, but there was nothing church in the song. He looked up at the case on the wall in wonder.
Yoth looked at Weran Root in similar wonder.
Everything was new.
Six months later, when Yoth was grabbing the rifle from the case in the dark, he heard the singing louder still, and as he fired, the singing reached a pitch of tambourine and cymbal, rattling bells, all that louder than the noise of the shot itself.
“Wait! I'm here to save you from the Devil!” cried the intruder, reaching for the barrel, but Yoth's aim was true, and it was already over.
The smoke was dense and final, a black cloud in his eyes and lungs underlining each cell, a fog like a forest fire. It took a moment to clear, but by the time it did, Yoth already knew what he'd done.
He'd put a bullet in the heart of the thin man in the white shirt, string tie, and black suit, a bullet from a singing rifle pawned over by a hunter. On his back on the floor lay the love of one man's life, his heart something unclaimable by ticket.
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 63
