Prophecies, Libels & Dreams

by Ysabeau S. Wilce

  But Etreyo does feel bitter. To the press, Detective Wilkins has credited his turnaround to the Bertillo System, the very system he had earlier ridiculed. The CPG has published a glowing account of his investigation, of his ferocious fight with the Hand. She has not been mentioned at all. Her report, contradicting Detective Wilkins’s in almost every detail, has been ignored by Captain Landaðon.

  She spits into the basin one last time; she’s out of Madama Twanky’s Oh-Be-Joyful tooth polish. She’s gone through two bottles already, and yet the taste still lingers. She should have bitten Detective Wilkins instead. She bets his flesh tastes just like chicken. It’s almost midnight: time for her to go on shift. She’s already changed into her blue tunic with the brass buttons. She collects her truncheon and her helmet; on the way out of the locker room, she finds herself blocked in again.

  “I want to thank you,” Detective Wilkins says. He takes his sunshades off. The blue bruising brings out the golden glints in his eyes. “You saved my life.”

  “That’s not what I read in the papers.”

  “Don’t take it personally. The police must always appear as heroes; that is how we keep order. But I am grateful.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” she says. “I was after the hand.”

  “Happy for me, then, that you are so single-minded.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To thank you,” he says sweetly, sincerely. “And to invite you to join my team.”

  “Your team?” she says warily.

  “Captain Landaðon has agreed that it is time for the department to modernize. To that end, I’m organizing a team to study the Bertillo System. I thought you might have some interest in joining it. Am I wrong?”

  Etreyo is torn. Finally—the Bertillo System is taken seriously. But to work under Detective Wilkins! She’d almost rather continue to patrol the Northern Sandbank. Wouldn’t she?

  “I’ll think about it,” she says.

  Detective Wilkins grins gorgeously. “Do that. We’ll be in the ready room. Oh, and here—a little token of my esteem.”

  Constable Etreyo waits until he’s gone before she opens the beribboned box he has given her. Nestled inside is a small cut-glass flask. She holds the bottle up and reads: Madama Twanky’s Mint-o Mouth Wash: Polish Your Palate Until it Shines!

  VI. The Verdict

  Constable Etreyo laughs and takes the bottle to the bathroom. The Mint-O Mouth Wash burns the awful taste away and makes her smile almost blinding. It would be a pity to waste that brilliant smile on the Northern Sandbanks. And anyway, doesn’t Detective Wilkins always get what he wants? Who is she to stand in the way of the hero of the hour?

  Etreyo puts her truncheon and helmet away, tucks the bottle of Mint-O in her locker, and walks down the hall to the ready room.

  Afterword to “Hand in Glove”

  We turn now to one of early Califa’s most infamous crimes. The Califa Squeeze, or as it later became known, The Hand of Gory, kept the city on edge for several months before its capture by Detective Anibal Wilkins y Aguille. The author of this piece clearly consulted Detective Wilkins’s autobiography, for the details here match up almost perfectly with his own account, although Detective Wilkins is more modest in his own description and gives his partner, Detective Aurelia Etreyo, more credit than she probably deserves.[1]

  The Doctors Ehle & Elsinore were responsible for the invention of the Azimuth Recombinator and the Galvanic Explicator, technology which helped bring Califa into the modern era. (In fact, it was during testing of the Azimuth Recombinator that the line between the Waking World and Elsewhere was severed.) Readers will be pleased to know that Nutter Norm died in a rest home at Niguel Playa, at the age of 106. Detective Etreyo left the Califa Police force four years after this case to found a private security company in Ticonderoga. Today, Zopilotes Ltd., still controlled by the Etreyo family, is the largest private security company in the world, with offices in fifteen countries.

  [1] See Aguille y Wilkins.

  Scaring the Shavetail

  It’s old Arizona again . . .

  Full of outlaws and bad bad men . . .

  Traditional Army Song

  After the war ended, I got a hankering to see the elephant. So I enlisted, in the Regulars this time, and followed the drum west. Back home they were settling into peace, but beyond the Mississippi it was still hot times. There was miners to protect, strikers to bust, bandits to chase, and Indians behind every bush. We were busy in the Dakotas, and busy in Texas, but Arizona Territory really kept us hopping.

  Back then, A.T. weren’t no pleasure fair, like it is today. Then, it was a hard dry land, full up with bronco bulls and bunco artists, poison toads and rattling snakes. And Apaches. Say what you will about them Sioux, or Cheyenne, or even the fierce Comanche. The Apaches had it over the whole lot. Oh, quiet and mild they were, one minute, sipping government coffee, eating government beef. Then suddenly, they’re off the reserve, cutting a trail of blood and death, and you riding right behind them, wishing you weren’t. They were dangerous, but not the most dangerous of all.

  I’d take old Geronimo over a shavetail any day.

  Oh, the green lieutenant, new from the Point, so fresh he smells of fish, with his polished brass buttons and starched paper collar, puffed up on his own authority. It ain’t hard to figure how the Apache is going to custerize you: bullet to the brain from a distance, knife to the throat up close. But a shavetail lieutenant, well, you never know how he’s going to get you. He’ll order you to guard duty in a lightning storm, or to camp in a wash. He’ll issue you poisonous beef or lead you too far from water because he’s hot on the chase. He’ll ride right into a box canyon because he’s too mighty to listen to his scout, and then be surprised when Mr. Lo and his savage friends pop out from behind the rocks, yodeling like Rebs. He’ll be surprised still when he and his scalp part company, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been fond of my hair and wanting to keep it.

  But thank the good Lord, a shavetail was as dangerous to himself as he was to the boys and tended to not last much longer than whiskey at a hog ranch. I served under five silly shavetails, and they went this way: Lieutenant Amberson fell into a dry well on his way back from the sinks and broke both his legs. Lieutenant Clarke stared into the sun during an eclipse and burned out his eyes. Lieutenant Mundy mixed river water into his gin and got the squirts so bad that he had to be removed to the hospital at McDowell on a stretcher, the boys crying boo-hoo before him and laughing up their sleeves as the ambulance pulled away in a puff of dust and muleskinner cursing. Lieutenant Brittan lasted the longest. Then the square-headed pimp forgot to check his girth and got bucked into a teddy bear cactus during morning parade. The surgeon got most of the spines out, but he resigned anyway and went back home to sell insurance. As shavetails go, he hadn’t been too bad, and some of the boys went on the bum when he left, but I figure that a man who can’t remember to check his own girth is a man who eventually is going to forget to check yours. Fair-thee-well my sweetheart, says the old song, my sentiments exactly.

  But it’s the fifth shavetail I am concerned with here, for reason you shall soon see. Like the others, he came to our troop fresh from the Point. Though the captain told me, over drinks in the back of the sutler’s store, that our boy graduated dead last in his class. His father was the quartermaster general of the army and a close friend of Uncle Billy’s, so that’s how he made it through his four years at all. It’s grand to have pull, but most of us don’t. In ’67 and ’68, I followed Uncle Billy all over Indian Territory as we chased them Cheyenne—even held his horse a couple of times—and I’ll wager he wouldn’t know me from Adam.

  Well, the shavetail came to Arizona without Uncle Billy to get him through, and even though the captain babied him, he was God’s own original Jonah. The boys liked him well enough, for he was amiable and always ready to give a payday loan or overlook a tarnished button, but that’s what you want in a comrade, not in a boss. And
he did the silliest things: burned green wood in his stove without opening his windows, almost smothering himself and his striker. Sprained his ankle dancing a jig at the Saturday baile. Missed retreat because he was racing frogs with the major’s children. Accidentally discharged his pistol while he was mounting up and shot a hole through the major’s straw boater.

  Through all these misfortunes, the shavetail remained happy and gay. But the boys and I weren’t happy and gay at all. We were listening to the telegraph chatter with news of Apache discontent and thinking about riding behind a man who couldn’t keep from shooting his own commanding officer. That thought gave us no pleasure.

  Git there firstest with the mostest General Forrest said during the War. He was a traitorous son-of-a-bitch, but he was right. The boys and I weren’t above making things a bit hot if we needed to, add a little extra encouragement to the shavetail’s departure, if he didn’t encourage himself quite enough.

  So we stepped in. When the shavetail was Officer of the Day, the fire alarm rang at Guard Post Number 5, the post closest to the sinks, and when he arrived to investigate he found an angry skunk pent up in the pisser. Someone let the dog pack into the Adjutant General’s office to run all over the papers the shavetail had spread out on the floor to dry, overlaying his painstaking columns of numbers with huge smeary paw prints. His drawers came back from the laundress pink because they’d been washed accidentally with Mrs. Captain McDonough’s magenta silk wrapper. His macaroni was replaced with snips of tubing and his oatmeal mixed with sand.

  But he had sand, this shavetail did, and he didn’t quit. Each misfortune he laughed off, saying “For this we are soldiers.” The boys were starting to mutter maybe he was all right, maybe he’d be just fine, but I wasn’t fooled. I remembered Captain Fetterman and his boast he could ride through the entire Sioux Nation (he could not), and though I was in Texas when Hard Ass Custer got his entire command killed, I could picture the scene perfectly.

  The shavetail had to go.

  So we hit him with both canister and shot. He woke up to a baby rattler in his bed, and tarantulas in his shoes. He whacked the rattler with an umbrella and carefully carried the tarantula outside. His lavender soap was replaced with lye; he got himself a jar of sweet oil from the sutler’s to coat the burns with and came to stable call smelling like a salad. We left the doors to the hay barn open and let five hundred dollars of hay blow away, five hundred dollars he would have to pay back himself. He got a money wire from his mamma.

  None of these torments discouraged him in the least. He remained still sweet, still nice, and still with us, and things were heating up. A ranch just outside of Miller’s Station had been burned to the ground, its stock driven off, and the mail was jumped twice in one week, strewing bloody letters halfway to Tucson. Our general wasn’t one to sit around when there was a chance of getting his name in the New York papers, never being one to miss a trick, and still feeling upstaged by Hard Ass Custer and his heroic end.

  It was time to up the ante, to give the shavetail the Old Hurrah. Back in the War, the boys had a way of dealing with a foolish officer. They just shot him when he wasn’t looking, but I never held with that solution then and I wasn’t going to start with it now. So I turned my mind to a less final trick, but it was hard coming up with perfect coup-de-grace. The shavetail had proven himself to be tenacious, and the setup had to be hard and foolproof.

  It was Mickey Free who provided the answer. Mickey wasn’t one of the boys. He was part Mexican, part Dutchman, but he’d been captured by the Apaches as a child and brought up among them. Now he was an army scout and interpreter, and none better. Like most Indians he loved a joke, and nothing suited his fancy more than a good prank. And few things soured Mickey faster than a green lieutenant, for ’twas a green lieutenant made such a mess of things in trying to rescue him, back before the War, ruining the peace between Cochise and the white man and causing so much sorrow. When Mickey heard of my conundrum, he proposed a solution immediately, and it was a crackerjack idea, oh yes.

  A greenhorn might have been skeptical, but I weren’t no greenhorn. It is true that we live in a rational age governed by scientific men, but these men, I do believe, ain’t never been to Arizona. There I saw such things that science cannot explain: rain falling from a clear blue sky, a coyote walking up right on two feet and wearing a red hat, the thighbone of a javelina that could sing Lorena. Once I was with a patrol that chased Geronimo and his band into a cave up in the Salt River Canyon, and though we blocked the exit for two days, not a one ever came back out again. Finally, the captain went up to investigate, and he found that cave empty as a licked skillet. Geronimo and his people were gone, and I know they didn’t sneak out at night for the moon was full, and a full moon in Arizona makes the night as bright as day. Geronimo had used his magic to make them vanish, only to reappear sixty miles south, below the Mexican Line. Or so he boasted later, and we all believed him. Arizona Territory is a strange and terrible place, full of strange and terrible magic, and I wager a man of science wouldn’t last long out here.

  So when Mickey proposed we put the scare into the shavetail with a chupacabra, I wasn’t skeptical one bit. The white man holds that the chupacabra is just a story to scare children with; in Arizona, most of what the white man holds don’t signify. A chupacabra, said Mickey, would be so fearsome and awful, the shavetail would hightail it back to his mamma in Baltimore City pronto.

  But we had to catch a chupacabra first. The chupacabra, Mickey said, was a canny clever creature, and could only be caught by a man of great power and integrity, in the light of the full moon. Mickey would take care of that, and in the meantime t’would be my job to put some nervousness into the shavetail, kind of soften him up some.

  And with the help of the boys, that’s what I did. A shuffle outside the shavetail’s quarters, late at night, strange snuffling. An even stranger howling, far off in the distance, eerie and echoing through the high desert night. The shavetail was bewildered, and getting to be a bit flighty, particularly when a trip to the sinks late one night (necessitated by the spoonful of castor Gothic had slipped into his evening coffee) was disturbed by red eyes winking out of the darkness and the sound of gnashing teeth. Later, Pinkey and Spooner (who’d been on guard that night) reported that the sight of the shavetail’s long legs pumping under his nightshirt as he sprinted back to the safety of his quarters was a one they would cherish fondly when age forced them into wicker chairs at the Old Soldier’s Home in Washington City, if they were ever allowed inside its doors.

  After a couple of days of softening, I met Mickey down at Maxey’s saloon. There, out behind the privy, he showed me a flour sack, weighty and smelling vaguely of sulphur. He’d tracked and bagged the chupacabra up near Needle’s canyon and drugged it with laudanum. But never worry, he assured me that the chupacabra would be lively enough when the time came. I wasn’t tempted to peek in the bag. Thanks to the War, my dreams are horrible enough; they need no more fuel.

  Next night, Pinky and Spooner rousted the entire garrison with their hysterical chatter. We gathered on the porch of the COQ to hear them blurt out their story. They’d been out on night guard, watching over fifty head of prime army beef, when their gentle reverie had been disturbed by an awful figure bounding out of the darkness, red eyes glittering like bayonets, stinking of brimstone and salt. This horrible apparition clutched a calf in its hairy paws. Pinky had fired at the horror, but he missed, stampeding the herd. In the melee the apparition vanished, unscathed.

  Was it Geronimo? the shavetail asked.

  At the mention of that name, Mrs. Major, magnificent as a ship at sail in her enormous pink wrapper, slid to the porch with a loud thump.

  No, not Geronimo, said Al Seiber, our chief of scouts, after Mrs. Major was hoisted into her parlor, there to be revived with a large whiskey.

  And then Al said an even more dreadful word, which made the boys clutch at other and shriek with horror.

  What’s a chupacabra? aske
d the shavetail. His nightcap was fuzzy and blue; I’d have bet a month of Pinky’s pay that the shavetail’s mamma had knit it for him. Oh, they are so sweet when they are young.

  A devil from hell, Al said darkly. He was in on it, of course, not because he was worried about his skin—no Indian ever put the scare on Al Seiber, but because he liked some fun. And also I’d promised to settle his sutler’s tab when the shavetail resigned. Al was a fine fellow, but he could drink until a lesser man would have drowned.

  What? asked the shavetail.

  Now Al, Colonel Grierson roared, don’t you go filling the lieutenant’s head with nonsense. ’Twas nothing more than a rabid coyote. The colonel was a good man, stalwart in a fight, but he was a solid Presbyterian in his beliefs and willfully blind to anything that fell outside them. He ordered the shavetail to take a detail, track down the coyote that had stampeded the herd, and custerize it.

  What’s a chupacabra? the shavetail asked again, at form-up, as he was checking our girths before we rode out. He was silly, that shavetail, but I had to admit we’d never caught him in that trick and after a while had not even bothered to try.

  It eats babies, said Spooner.

  It sucks souls, said Pinky.

  It has eyes as red as hot shot and teeth like tombstones, said Henderson.

  It can jump fifty feet straight in the air and will suck you dry, said Mickey Free.