Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  ‘I guess there’s only one way to find out,’ Tom said. ‘Let’s hit the road. We’ve got some ground to cover. The gate opens at exactly six p.m., stays open for just ten minutes. If we miss it, we’ll have to spend a whole day hiding out in the desert before it opens again, and meanwhile our friends will be doing their best to hunt us down.’

  They drove through a pass in stark mountains to the desert plain spread beyond. The sun burned white through a haze of dust. Sheets of dust blew across the road and laid a fine mantle on the windshield. Broken glass glinted along the margin of the two-lane blacktop, mile after mile. They passed a military base with decommissioned missiles aimed at the sky either side of the gate in its chain-link fence, drove through the little desert settlement of Point of Sands. When a bullet-riddled marker for Alamogordo appeared, Tom told his daughter to pull off the road. He jumped out as soon as the car had stopped and raised the hood.

  ‘Linda will make like a damsel in distress. When the local law comes by to help her out, we take their cruiser. Then we ride up to that cabin, and when the bad guys come out to see what the local law wants, we’ll draw down on them and let them know what’s what.’

  Stone squinted in the hot whip of the wind. ‘Suppose the local cops don’t come by?’

  ‘Then we’ll go find them,’ Tom said, and took a swig from his bottle of Jack Daniel’s. ‘But trust me, we won’t need to.’

  ‘Because it’s supposed to happen? Because this is what’s predestined ?’

  ‘Don’t be sarcastic, Mr Stone,’ Linda said. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘You still don’t believe me,’ Tom said. ‘I don’t mind, because I know that in a few hours you’ll be singing a different tune. You’ll be begging me to help your woman.’

  ‘Susan is dead, you son of a bitch. Nothing can help her now.’

  Stone knew that he shouldn’t have let the jibe get to him, but he was tired, he was worried that he still hadn’t figured out Tom’s game, and he knew that he couldn’t expect any help from Linda, who was clearly taking her father’s side. He had to step hard on the impulse to put his pistol in Tom’s face and have it out there and then; if he was going to get back to the Real, he had to pretend to go along with his old friend’s plan, even it was dangerously cockeyed and probably hid some devious stratagem which almost certainly hinged on using him as a patsy.

  Tom must have read Stone’s intention in his gaze or his body language. He smiled and said, ‘You think you can take me, Adam?’

  ‘Is it going to come to that?’

  Linda said, ‘It looks like someone’s heading this way. You two old men are going to have to work off your excess testosterone some other time.’

  Stone looked around, saw in the far distance a glittering dot bobbing in the glassy heat shimmering off the road.

  ‘We aren’t done with this,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe not, but we’re getting close.’

  Stone and Tom Waverly hid inside a circle of creosote bushes and watched the glimmering dot resolve into a battered pickup. It pulled up beside the green Oldsmobile and its driver, a lean young man with a high-crowned straw hat set square on his thickly greased black hair, got out and talked with Linda. Both of them looked under the raised hood; Linda shook her head as if refusing some offer; the driver touched the brim of his hat with thumb and forefinger and got back in his pickup and drove off toward Alamogordo.

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ Tom said.

  He unbuckled his belt, pulled half of it out of the loops of his jeans, and began to strop the blade of his knife against it. The shotgun lay beside him, a plastic bag knotted over its muzzle so that sand wouldn’t get in the barrels.

  Linda sat on a ridge of dirt by the car. Stone saw a greasy flash of sunlight on plastic when she took a swig from a bottle of water. He took a long drink from his own bottle and said, ‘Even if we manage to get hold of a cop’s car, do you really think driving up to the gate in it will give us an edge?’

  ‘The people guarding the gate may be working for GYPSY, but they’re also Company people,’ Tom said, intent on his work with the knife. ‘And it’s still standard operating procedure to keep on the right side of the local law in uncontacted sheaves. We can ride right up to the place in a cop car, and get the jump on them before they realise who we really are.’

  ‘Then what? What’s supposed to happen when we go through the gate and get back to the Real?’

  ‘You mentioned predestination just now. Do you believe in it? Do you think we’re no more than robots, acting out parts already written for us?’

  ‘Of course not. If we didn’t have free will, if we didn’t make choices that mattered, choices that really changed things one way or the other, there would only be one sheaf.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Tom raised his knife and studied the edge of its blade. ‘It’s because our choices can make a difference that nothing about the future is certain. And if the future isn’t fixed, neither is the past. If you could travel back in time, you could change things around. You could fix all your mistakes.’

  ‘That’s a fantasy, Tom.’

  Tom slipped the knife into its sheaf and buckled his belt. ‘I plan to blow GYPSY wide open and bring the people in charge of it to justice. I plan to make sure that I don’t get a fatal dose of radiation, and don’t set off to kill those doppels of Eileen Barrie. And if I’m successful, you’ll stay on your farm in that backwater sheaf, Adam, and never get involved in any of this.’

  ‘The problem is that I am involved,’ Stone said.

  ‘You’re involved because good old TW Two knows that I need your help to change things. He sacrificed himself, Adam, so that I would have the chance to live through this. I aim to make sure that he didn’t die in vain.’

  ‘According to you, we wouldn’t be here unless, sometime in the near future, you get a fatal dose of radiation, travel back in time and tell your own past self what to do, go on to murder Eileen Barrie’s doppels, and end up in Pottersville. So if we change things, there’ll be no TW Two, he won’t travel into his past and tell you what to do, and none of this will have happened.’

  ‘Time travel doesn’t only create a new history; it also creates a new sheaf. If things work out, we’ll end up in a different sheaf living through an entirely different history where none of the unpleasant stuff has to happen.’ Tom smiled and shook his head. ‘Will you listen to us? Two old-school snake-eating cowboy angels arguing about metaphysics. How did it ever come to this?’

  ‘I guess you’re the one with all the answers.’

  ‘I guess I am.’

  They sat quietly for a few minutes. At last, Tom looked up and cupped a hand to one ear. ‘Hear that? Pretty good response time, don’t you think?’

  Stone crouched beside him in the creosote bushes and watched as a police cruiser drove out of the haze of blowing dust and shimmering air and pulled off the road in front of the Oldsmobile. A solidly-built Sheriff’s deputy climbed out, set a Stetson on his head, and exchanged a few words with Linda before taking a look at the Oldsmobile’s engine. When Stone and Tom stepped onto the road, pistols drawn, the deputy studied them from beneath the brim of his Stetson, sizing them up calmly, telling them that they’d just entered a world of trouble unless they put up the guns right away.

  Tom said, ‘There won’t be any unpleasantness as long as you do what I say. We clear on that?’

  The deputy looked at him, then turned his head and spat on the road.

  Tom told him to take out his revolver and toss it into the creosote bushes, then said that they were going to take a walk off to the side of the road.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about me, mister,’ the deputy said. ‘I’m not about to try anything dumb.’

  ‘We aren’t going to do anything dumb either,’ Stone said, as much for Tom’s benefit as the deputy’s, and followed the two men into the brush.

  Fifty yards in, Tom told the deputy to take off his tunic. ‘The hat too.’

  ‘Cost me for
ty-five dollars,’ the deputy said as he handed it over. ‘Take good care of it.’

  ‘Sit down and put your hands to the back of your head,’ Tom said.

  He cuffed the deputy and told him to keep his head down or he was liable to get it blown off. Back on the road, he pulled the keys from the Oldsmobile’s ignition and threw them into the bushes, then shrugged off his jacket, put on the deputy’s khaki tunic, and swept up his hair and set the Stetson on his head.

  Stone said, ‘The guy will walk out into the road as soon as we’re gone, and flag down the first vehicle that comes along.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Tom said, smiling his sly smile. He checked his watch, took a swig from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s. ‘You ride shotgun, Adam. Put on your jacket and tie and try to look like the hard-ass government agent you used to be. In this tunic and shit-kicker hat, I reckon I stand a good chance of being mistaken for a local law enforcement officer who found you wandering in the desert.’

  ‘You think the bad guys will buy a story as lame as that?’

  ‘It’ll give us about thirty seconds. All the time in the world to do what needs to be done.’ Tom took another swallow of whiskey and said to Linda, ‘This could get messy. Are you ready for that?’

  She gave a tight nod, straight up and down, and said, ‘Are you sure the people guarding the gate work for GYPSY?’

  ‘I give you my word. They stand between us and where we need to go and what we need to do, so we have to deal with them.’

  ‘If we’re going to do it, let’s do it properly,’ Stone said. ‘Lose the whiskey, Tom. You don’t need Dutch courage.’

  ‘You don’t know what I need,’ Tom said. ‘Take the shotgun and lay down in the back seat of this fine law-enforcement automobile, honey,’ he told Linda. ‘We have to get moving.’

  Tom drove at high speed toward Alamogordo and after a few miles swung the cruiser past a red-painted mailbox, scarcely slowing. The rear end of the heavy vehicle shimmied, raising a cloud of dust; then Tom had it under control and they were roaring along a track that climbed a long slope of scrub and stony sand.

  The caretaker’s shack was built of weathered grey planking, with a slanting tin roof weighted with rocks. A fantail windmill turned atop a wooden tower. The cruiser skidded to a halt on the rutted dirt in front, next to a brand-new pickup truck that still had the dealer’s sticker in its rear window. Tom took out his pistol and worked the slide, then sounded the horn. Telling Stone, ‘Leave the first move to me.’

  Stone squeezed down his nerves, found the still, cold place in his head that allowed him to sit calmly, watching through the dusty windshield as two men came out of the shack. One hung back by the door while the other, a muscular young guy in desert camo combat pants and a cut-off T-shirt, ambled toward the cruiser, his thumbs stuck in his beltloops. Tom Waverly cranked down the window and the man looked in at him with a kind of amiable arrogance and asked if there was a problem.

  Tom jerked a thumb at Stone and said, ‘Know this fellow?’

  The man stooped to peer at Stone and Tom rammed his pistol into the soft flesh under his chin and shot him. A bloody fog burst from the top of his head and he collapsed backward. The man in the doorway of the shack reached behind himself and pulled out a pistol. Tom shot at him and missed, and Linda sat up and stuck the shotgun through the back window and fired both barrels, the noise incredibly loud inside the cruiser, and the man was knocked on his back. The plank wall on either side of the doorway was gouged and splintered by shot.

  Stone pushed out of the cruiser and ran to where the second man lay twitching on the dirt. He clutched his chest with both hands, blood welling up over his fingers. Blood bubbled from his mouth and there were holes ripped in his throat and face. Stone kicked his pistol away and stepped over him and checked the shack’s single room, pointing his own pistol left and right, high and low. His heart was beating strongly in his chest and he felt as if he was at the centre of a humming calm. Everything - cards abandoned on the table, disordered bunk beds, dust motes floating in sunlight that burned through a window - stood out with extraordinary particularity.

  Tom came up behind him, breathless, grinning like a maniac. He’d taken off the Stetson and his grey hair hung around his face. The bottle of Jack Daniel’s was clutched in one fist, his pistol in the other. He stooped over the man, lifted his head by the hair and asked him who had sent him, who he’d reported to. But the man was dead. Tom went through his pockets and found a walkie-talkie. He switched it on and held it by his ear, listening to the voice that whispered from it, smiling at Stone.

  ‘This guy is worried about his friends. He heard the shots, isn’t sure what happened,’ Tom said, and mashed the walkie-talkie’s speak button. ‘Here’s some breaking news, pal. You’re in deep shit. Your friends are dead, and pretty soon we’re coming up there for you.’

  Stone said, ‘Where is he? Up by the gate?’

  ‘You bet. Don’t you worry, partner, this is all going exactly to plan.’

  Tom walked back to the police cruiser and hugged Linda and told her that she’d done the right thing, he wanted her to know that he was proud of her.

  She pulled away from him and said, ‘You didn’t have to shoot him.’

  ‘Yes, I did. I couldn’t risk overpowering him because his friend would have started shooting at us. It’s hard, but there it is.’

  ‘Tell me one thing, and don’t lie. You knew the deputy would come and check me out. Did you know that we’d have to kill these men, too?’

  ‘I hoped it wouldn’t come to it. I swear to God. But as soon as they both walked out, I knew there wasn’t any other way.’

  ‘Are we going to make it through?’

  ‘Of course we are. If you’re up to it, I’d like you to walk up to that ridge,’ Tom said, ‘and keep watch on the road. A bunch of cops will be coming along any moment now, and I need to know when they show.’

  ‘You were told about that, too, I suppose.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘I’m about to tell them where to find us. Walk up there and keep watch, okay?’

  Linda stared at him, a muscle jumping in her jaw. Then she snatched the bottle of Jack Daniel’s from his hand and took a long drink. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, handed the bottle back to her father, pulled the shotgun from the back seat of the cruiser, and walked off.

  Stone watched her go. He felt as if he had just seen something fine and precious smashed to pieces.

  Tom lifted the radio handset from its cradle under the cruiser’s dashboard and told the dispatcher there was trouble out at the Anderson place. ‘The property just past mile twenty, you know it?’ he said. ‘We have two men down, looks like there’s gonna be a third before too long. No, ma’am, your deputy is hogtied a ways down the road. I’m one of the bad guys who stole his cruiser and shot those poor men dead. If you want to bring me to justice, you should send your best men out here.’

  ‘Was that necessary?’ Stone said.

  ‘You’ve been in plenty of bad situations. You know it was.’

  ‘I don’t mean the theatrics. I mean was it necessary to involve your daughter?’

  ‘We’re all in this together,’ Tom said, as he took off the uniform tunic. ‘The law should be here in ten or fifteen minutes. It’s five-forty now, and the gate opens at six. We’re cutting it close, but I reckon we’ll do it.’

  ‘If you really are Tom Waverly, something really bad must have happened to you. Because the Tom Waverly I knew would never have used his daughter like that.’

  ‘I didn’t see you stepping in to help.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were planning to shoot those two. And don’t tell me you had to. You knew you were going to do it all along.’

  ‘I guess it’s knowing what will happen to me if I fail that makes me a hard-ass,’ Tom said. He pulled on his denim jacket and walked past Stone and shaded his eyes, looking across the desert panorama. ‘They test missiles out there, the kind that carry nuclear wa
rheads. A little further north is the spot where they exploded the first atom bomb in this sheaf, the prototype of the two bombs they dropped on Japan to end their version of World War Two. Funny, isn’t it, how history can work out so differently in different sheaves, yet some things always stay the same? The equivalent of the CIG in this sheaf, the CIA, has its headquarters at Langley, just like the Company. Hell, its officers even call it the Company.’

  ‘I know. I lived here once upon a time.’

  ‘We stole the idea of memorialising our dead with a Wall of Honor from them, did you know that? Ideas go back and forth, histories bleed into each other through the gates, grow more and more alike. Maybe one day every history will collapse into every other history, and we’ll end up with just one sheaf.’

  ‘I’m not in the mood for barroom philosophy, Tom.’

  ‘Do you think that meta-sheaf would feature the best of every history, or the worst? Think about it, ’ Tom said, and walked a little way up the slope and used the walkie-talkie, goading the man at the gate, telling he’d better get ready, he’d soon have to make a hard decision.

  Linda stood some way off, cradling the shotgun as she stared toward the road. Stone decided that it would be better to leave her alone and squatted in shade cast by the cruiser, brushing flies from his face. The windmill made an arthritic creak as it turned in the erratic wind. A hollow feeling grew in his chest as the time at which the gate would open drew closer.

  At last, Linda turned to her father and called out. ‘Here they come!’

  Stone got to his feet and saw two cruisers chasing each other along the road, light bars flashing. They were two or three miles off, coming on fast. Tom Waverly took a drink of Jack Daniel’s and tossed the bottle to one side and said it was time they dealt with the guy who stood between them and the gate.

  They climbed into the pickup truck and Tom drove it up the stony slope toward a line of tall rocks that in the light of the setting sun glowed blood-red against the pale sky like a palisade hammered into the earth by aboriginal giants. There was a notch between two of them, a track wandering into its vee of deep shadow. Tom steered the pickup off-road, jolting through scrub, pulling up to one side of the notch.