Guns of Seneca 6 Box Set Collected Saga (Chambers 1-4)

by Bernard Schaffer

  Lively piano music was coming from the building nearest the assistance office. Its walls were painted pink with light blue window shutters and paper hearts and colorful streamers tacked along the porch. There was a large sign above the entranceway marked the Dalewood. Through the doorway, Winnie could see women dressed in exotic furs, surrounded by men who were trying to woo them. It only took her one look to realize what kind of place it was.

  When they'd first come through the gates of Seneca 6, there was a big saloon called The Proud Lady. Women stood on the porch and called out to men, waving colorful scarves at them and deriding them if they kept on walking. "Perfect," Mama said. "Turns out I was wrong. Your father would have loved it here. Damn cat houses are the reason we couldn't afford food." She looked up at the women and shouted, "Godless whores!" Winnie sank down low in the cart as they rolled past, but the women didn't even bother to look at them.

  Winnie looked away from this new cat house and saw that people were already starting to file in behind her. Sunrise brought a long line of men in filthy clothes. Women surrounded by hungry-looking children. Winnie felt ashamed to be ahead of them in line. She felt ashamed to be in the line at all.

  At nine o'clock a man in a suit came strolling up the street carrying a cup of coffee and a briefcase, shaking his head at the length of the line. "Sorry to keep everyone waiting," he said as he fished in his pockets for the keys. "Not like anyone here has anywhere to be."

  He opened the door to let himself in and shut it quickly behind him, locking it again. Several minutes later, he rolled up the blinds of his window and flipped his sign around to read Open. He unlocked his door and said, "One at a time, and stay in your order. Who's first?"

  Winnie folded her hands in front of her and walked in, "I think that's me, sir."

  The man picked up a pencil and said, "Where's your parents?"

  "My mother passed away, sir. My father ain't around."

  "Well we can only provide assistance to adults. Go find your father and come back."

  "What do you do for orphans?"

  "Place them in orphanages."

  "Oh. Then I guess I'll go find my father," she said.

  "Next!" The man called out.

  Winnie got shoved aside by the man coming in behind her. She backed away toward the door and had to push her way out to get past the rest of the people crowding the entrance.

  She went back to the hospital and sank down in the chair next to her brother's bed, hoping that he might be awake, but he hadn't moved so much as a finger since the night before. The nurse came over, her bright blue eyelids raised high with concern, "Why aren't you at the assistance office?"

  "They won't see me 'cause I'm just a kid. They said they'd put us into orphanages."

  "Oh my," she said. "Well, sweetie, they do have some really nice orphanages off-planet. It might be the best thing for you both."

  "Over my dead body," Winnie said.

  "All right, all right, don't go getting upset."

  Mr. Millner came down the hallway toward them, his chart stuck under his nose as he scrolled down the list of names. He stopped at Abe's bed and pushed his glasses high up on his nose, "Well? Have you made arrangements to pay for your brother's treatment?"

  "You have to treat him even if I don't pay," she said. "That's the law, ain't it?"

  "Absolutely correct," he said brightly. "And the good news is, your brother looks to be improving remarkably. I will tell the doctors to have him released at once. Treatment completed."

  He turned to walk away and Winnie shouted, "Wait! How much do I need to give you to let him stay until he's all better?"

  Millner checked his chart and said, "It will cost seven dollars severian a day to keep him here."

  Winnie swallowed at the idea of paying such an enormous amount. "All right," she whispered. "That's fine. I'll get it to you, but can you please give me until tomorrow?"

  He sighed and said, "Only because I am sympathetic to your plight and we are first and foremost concerned with our patient's well-being. But if I do not have the money tomorrow morning, your brother is leaving this hospital, even if I have to drag him out back and leave him in the alley."

  As he walked away, Winnie fantasized about all the different ways she might murder the man if he so much as laid one finger on Abe. The threat of someone leaving him in an alley was enough to make her see red.

  She got up from her chair and headed down the hall, gritting her teeth in frustration, when she passed the nurse. The woman smiled at her, lips so drenched in red lipstick it smeared on her teeth. "You okay, honey?" she said.

  "No," Winnie whimpered. She scrunched up her face like she was crying and babbled something incoherent about her brother and dead mother. The nurse wrapped her arms around Winnie and squeezed her, telling her everything would be all right. While the nurse rocked her back and forth, Winnie snuck her hand into her white uniform pocket and managed to grab a hold of a lipstick tube and small container of blue eye shadow.

  The bartender's name was Dan and he looked Winnie up and down and said, "How old did you say you were again?"

  The Dalewood's parlor walls were lined with mirrors behind him, reflecting the varying colors of the liquor bottles and the faces of the people crowding the parlor. Winnie nearly winced at the sight of her garishly made-up face. She looked like a clown. "Eighteen," she said. "I just look young."

  "And you say you done this sort of work before?"

  "Oh, sure," Winnie said. "I worked at the Proud Lady in Seneca 6 for a month before I came here."

  He poured a glass of whiskey and said, "You want a drink?"

  "Sure."

  "What kind?"

  She looked down at his glass and said, "Same as you're having."

  Dan chuckled as he poured her a glass and dropped it in front of her. "Bottoms up," he said.

  Winnie wrapped both her hands around the glass and lifted it to her nose to sniff it. It smelled like fuel for farming equipment. She watched him down the glass with one sip and wipe his mouth, "Damn. That's a good burn." She put it up to her lips and immediately felt the alcohol sting the tip of her tongue. She closed her eyes and poured it down her throat, trying not to gag.

  "It sure is," she coughed. Once she could talk again, she said, "How much do the girls make here?"

  "Five bucks a throw. Plus tips. For a pretty little thing like you, as young as you look, I'd reckon you make about thirty, forty dollars severian if you do four customers a day."

  "Really?"

  "Sure. What were you making back in Seneca 6?"

  "Oh, well, it was really slow back there," she said.

  He put down his empty glass and said, "All right, you ready?"

  "For what?"

  "To get started? I'll take you upstairs right now for a test drive."

  "Okay," Winnie said. She looked up the staircase and saw a series of closed doors overlooking the parlor.

  He came around the bar and said, "Well, come on. It's lucky you walked in here today. I been in the mood to poke somethin' since I woke up."

  Winnie followed him up the stairs to the first closed door. He opened it and told her, "Go ahead in and take off your clothes. Leave 'em on the chair, though, 'cause you don't want to put nothin' on the floor in these rooms. God knows what goes on with some of these freaks." He watched her eagerly as she undid her dress straps and unbuttoned her skirt. His head bobbed up and down approvingly at the sight of her bare chest and narrow hips, saying, "Yeah, girl. You gonna fit in here real nice."

  The next morning, Winnie limped down the hallway past her brother's bed. He still hadn't moved. She ignored the nurses and instead walked up to the Mr. Millner's closed office door and slammed her fist on it. When he opened it, she thrust a brown paper bag at him. Millner's eyes widened at the sight of the crumpled bills inside. "That's fifteen dollars severian," Winnie said. "You try and have Abe removed before he's ready and I'll pay somebody to break both your arms."

  On the day Abe was re
leased from the hospital, there was a fancy-looking stagecoach waiting outside of the front door for him. The driver jumped down and picked up Abe's small bag and said, "Mr. Graves? Right this way."

  "Where's my sister?"

  The driver shrugged, "All I know is I'm supposed to take you to this address where you both'll be livin'."

  Abe got into the carriage and flinched when the driver slammed the door shut beside him. The noise reminded him of a gunshot. As the coach began to move, he looked through the window at the town that would be their new home. His side still ached, even though the stitches were out and the wound was not nothing more than a scar that itched like the devil.

  The coach rode far from the center of town, out into the boonies where there were only a few houses to be seen. They stopped in front of a small shack with a crooked door frame and windows covered by nailed-up wooden boards. The driver opened his door and said, "Here you go, Mr. Graves."

  Abe looked at the structure and scowled in disgust. He twisted the rusty doorknob and saw the tiny room with a single mattress on the floor. It was small, but someone had recently cleaned it and stocked the small kitchen area with cans of food and bread. There was a note on the oven that read, "I'll be back home later on tonight. Make yourself some food and stay in the house."

  His sister's things were piled neatly in the corner. Dresses that Abe did not recognize. Colorful ribbons for her hair and cosmetics in fancy-looking cases. He saw something metal underneath them and picked it up, a round Deputy Sheriff's badge with the number six emblazoned on the center. Abe turned the badge over in his hands and saw dried blood.

  Winnie arrived hours later, long after nightfall. She rode up to the house on a powerful-looking destrier that Abe had never seen before. He opened up the front door as she was tying the animal to the hitch and said, "Where did you get that?"

  "She belonged to Deputy Masters. I didn't feel right selling her."

  "Where were you all night? Why weren't you there when I left the hospital?"

  Winnie patted him on the head as she walked into the house and looked around, "Did you eat?"

  "Yeah, but where were you, I said?" He leaned closer and sniffed her, smelling cheap perfume and stale liquor. She smelled the way he remembered their father smelling from when he was a child. "You stink."

  "Thanks," she said. "I had to work, Abe. You wouldn't believe how much money this all cost."

  Abe sat on the mattress and folded his legs, "You got a job? Wow."

  "Yep."

  "What do you do?"

  She shrugged and said, "I'm a dancer. There's a piano player and I stand next to him and dance for tips."

  "You can't dance, though," Abe said. "Mama always said you had two left feet."

  "Well, she ain't here so it don't matter what she said. Now you go on and get some rest, you got school tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow? I can't go to school tomorrow!" he whined.

  "The hell you ain't," Winnie said. "I already paid for it, and you are gonna go. Every night you're gonna sit here and study, too. That's the rules. I work, and you go to school. Otherwise, the government man is gonna come along and throw you in an orphanage!" She spat the word like it meant threshing-machine.

  Abe sulked and threw himself back on the bed with a moan. "It's not fair. You get to work and make money and have fun and I gotta go to some stupid school."

  "Nothing's fair," she said. "Anybody says otherwise is lyin'."

  By the weekend, she'd saved enough to take her brother into town and get him a haircut and some new clothes. "All them girls are gonna fall in love once they get a load of you," she said. "A new coat, maybe some boots. You're gonna be the prize pig. They won't be able to stop talkin' about you."

  "All the girls here are ugly," Abe said.

  "They might be ugly now, but just wait. Over the summer, they're gonna start sproutin' all sorts of bumps and lumps."

  "Yuck," he said.

  Winnie laughed as she hopped down to tether Buttercup in front of the barber shop. She held the door open for him and saw a few men sitting in the waiting chairs that she recognized from work. They smiled and nodded at her, but no one spoke, and Winnie kept her head down. "Tell the man you want a haircut and give him this," she said. She handed him a few coins and sat in the corner quietly, away from everyone else.

  There were catalogues and newspapers piled on the side tables and Winnie scanned through them, trying to keep out of sight, when the front door opened. The barber looked up and said, "Mr. and Mrs. Millner, how are you?"

  Millner came in behind a stern-looking rotund woman in a floppy hat. Millner saw Abe sitting in the barber's chair and said, "Hello, young man. How are you feeling?"

  "Better," Abe said.

  "Good," Millner said with a broad smile. "I take great personal satisfaction in your recovery. The most important thing you can do now is embrace the second chance that God has given you and become a man of great character."

  Millner's wife tugged on his sleeve and said something under her breath. Winnie only caught the last whisper of, "The one you told me about?"

  He cocked an eye at Winnie and said, "And how are you doing, young lady?"

  "Fine, Mr. Millner," she said.

  Mrs. Millner started to fan herself and muttered, "I thought this was a respectable establishment."

  The barber glanced up at her, his face riddled with guilt, but he said nothing.

  "This town is getting so that decent folk can't walk anywhere without being surrounded by filth and godless whores."

  Winnie's face flushed with anger, but when she looked at Abe, she saw that the barber had turned the chair away from them and was chatting in the boy's ear about how he wanted his hair cut. Mr. Millner waved his hand at the door and said, "Come on, mother. Let's find somewhere else to spend our money."

  Abe was making faces in the mirror, goofy kid expressions as the barber showed him what he'd look like with it short, or spiked, or parted. Finally, he decided how he wanted it to look and said, "What do you think, Winnie? Is this the one that's gonna make everybody talk about me?"

  The men in the shop were all staring at her, but Winnie could only nod.

  Dan poured Winnie her usual glass when she walked in that afternoon and set it on the bar. One of the regulars reached over to squeeze her ass, but she slapped his hand away and said, "Don't be rude!" She flopped onto the bar stool, grabbed the glass with one hand, and drained it. "Hit me again."

  Dan poured her another and said, "What's got into you, today?"

  "Some rich church bitch with a mouth on her. She's lucky I was with my brother, or I'd have punched her right in the face."

  "She's just jealous 'cause her husband would rather be in here than at home," Dan said. "Hey, I got something that might cheer you up."

  "Good luck," she said.

  "No, I'm serious. The piano player got a new song about your old town." He cupped his hand to the side of his mouth and called out, "Play that one about Seneca 6."

  The piano player nodded and spun his stool around to face the piano. He cracked his knuckles before touching the keys and quickly fell into a sloppy rag-time melody, singing,

  "Royce Halladay was a sickly man, with a young purty bride

  `Twas a fateful day we all heard him say, 'Fair Katey, please go outside,

  an' fetch us some grub, fetch us some grub, fetch us somethin' for the pot'

  but when she ain't come back, he went to check, and saw something can't be forgot.

  It was six itjins, so they say, struck fair Katey down

  an' even kilt ol' Tilt Junger, who'd come a pokin' his nose around

  gon' getcha ol' Tilt, gon' getcha ol' Tilt, gon' scalp that whiteboy's hide

  gon' do all sorts a devilish things till Doctor Halladay come outside.

  Well, the old coot jest went crazy an' all them itjins died

  but he couldn't live without fair Katey

  so he jumped into the Coramide

  an' he jumped to hi
s doom, jumped to his doom, jumped to his death to go meet his bride."

  Dan the bartender clapped and said, "Wasn't that fun?"

  Winnie nodded absent-mindedly and slid down off her stool. She walked over to the piano player and tapped him on the shoulder, "Is that what really happened to Doc Halladay? All I ever heard was that it was something terrible."

  The piano player shrugged, "Hell if I know, girl. I just sing it the way it was wrote."

  "Did he jump in the Coramide Canyon?" she insisted.

  "I said I don't know. Shouldn't you be upstairs on all fours or something?"

  She opened her mouth to curse at him, but the front door opened and a young woman, just a few years older than Winnie, got shoved through it. The man that came up behind her looked over the rest of the people in the parlor and said, "I got some fresh meat here. Who wants it?"

  His long brown hair was slicked back now and his mustache had been waxed to two fine points like whiskers, but when Johnny Starr looked directly at her, Winnie's blood went cold. She braced herself for the worst, but when his cruel and arrogant expression didn't change and he kept taking stock of the room, she let herself breathe again. Dan the bartender waved for Starr to come over to the bar. "This is a privately-owned establishment sir. We don't take freelancers."

  Mr. Pine entered the doorway, running his hand up and down the long leather strap of his instrument case. His greasy black hair hung down over his face and he walked past Winnie without so much as looking at her.

  Starr folded his hands on the bar and said, "So you don't want my girl? She's a pretty little thing." The girl whimpered as he grabbed her by the back of her hair and pulled her close. "And she'll do what she's told, I assure you."

  Dan looked her over and said, "How much?"

  "Twenty dollars."

  Dan spat with laughter, "Not unless she lays severian eggs."