The Long Past & Other Stories

by Ginn Hale

  His companion had obviously regained enough strength to build a fire in the lee of two nearby gravestones. The man leaned up against the taller of the stones, with his goggles shoved up on his head to hold his hair back from his face. He’d helped himself to the catfish from Lucky’s basket, spitting them on a stake and setting them over the flames to cook.

  With the light playing over his features and shining across the silver streaks in his blond hair, it became horribly obvious to Lucky that this man didn’t just sound a lot like Dalfon Elias. There was no mistaking the white scar that cut through his left eyebrow like the tail of a comet or the hard lines around his mouth and brow that made him appear far older than his twenty-five years. That was him, in the flesh and looking rough—the front of his coat tattered and bloody, a bruise darkening his cheekbone. And of course, the smug bastard just gazed up at the stars as if he hadn’t a care in the damn world.

  Lucky wanted to knock that easy smile right off of his face. At the same time some part of him still longed to wrap his arms around Dalfon and tell him how much he’d missed him. If that didn’t make Lucky a fool, he didn’t know what did. Dalfon had promised a fine life for the two of them together in the west; then he’d left Lucky waiting at the Edgewater Coach Station.

  And Lucky had waited.

  He’d stood for hours on the muddy street, anticipating that wonderful moment when at last Dalfon might appear. He’d watched the sun rise as high as his hopes and then sink down into the dirt.

  Now Dalfon had the gall to show up and trot alongside him like he didn’t know Lucky from Adam. Despite all that, Lucky’s heart pounded in his chest and as much joy as rage roused in him at the sight of the man. Lucky wasn’t certain if he felt more angry at Dalfon or himself for harboring so much longing.

  “You gonna lay there staring all night or come over and eat something?” Dalfon called.

  Lucky glared at him thinking that, yes, he was more mad at Dalfon then he was at himself. Maybe madder than at anyone else he’d ever met.

  “Seems a waste not to eat fish while they’re fresh,” Dalfon added. “If you aren’t hungry, I don’t suppose you’d mind me helping myself.”

  That was the last straw. Lucky jumped to his feet and stomped to the fireside. “Those are my fish.”

  “Don’t think I said otherwise, did I?” Dalfon replied with a smile.

  The man was infuriating! But Lucky couldn’t think of a rejoinder that didn’t make him sound like a foul-mouthed brat.

  Lucky crouched down and glowered at the bright orange flames. The catfish smelled good. Dalfon must have gutted them and filled their bodies with tarragon, which grew wild all across the island. He’d probably been the one who’d strewn fern and licorice fronds across the large, flat rock near the fire. Lucky had taught him that trick during the six months Dalfon had tarried in Riverain County.

  Dalfon lifted the spit from the fire and, using the flat of his hunting knife, slid all three big catfish onto the frond-covered rock in front of Lucky.

  “Can’t offer much in the way of silverware, but you’re welcome to my knife, if you’d like.” Dalfon turned the hilt to Lucky.

  “I got my own.” Lucky pulled his fishing knife from the sheath at his belt.

  Dalfon nodded. He wiped the long blade of his hunting knife across the grass, cleaning it, and slipped it back into its sheath. Lucky stared at the blackened bodies of the catfish. Then he stole a glance up at Dalfon. The front of his coat looked nearly as scorched as the fish.

  “Ain’t you still dying of that curse Frank Swaim hit you with?” Not that Lucky wanted to give Dalfon the satisfaction of thinking he cared. He was simply curious and making conversation.

  “I’m touched by your concern.”

  “Don’t be.” Lucky cut through charred fish skin to the steaming flesh beneath. “I just want to put my claim on your hunting knife and revolver once you drop.”

  “Well, I’m going to have to disappoint you, for today at least.” Dalfon tossed a piece of pale driftwood into the fire.

  Lucky ate a couple mouthfuls, waiting for Dalfon to explain himself, but instead the man leaned back against a gravestone and returned to gazing up at the stars. Lucky finished off one entire catfish and made a couple stabs at the second, but he didn’t possess the appetite to choke down the rest. He entertained a petty urge to shove the remains into the fire and deprive Dalfon of any, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Dalfon might have hurt him, but he’d only be disappointing himself if he let heartbreak turn him so spiteful and mean.

  “You want this?” Lucky gestured at the remaining fish.

  “You had your fill already?” Dalfon asked.

  Lucky nodded and shifted over as Dalfon moved closer to eat. Even using a hunting knife, he was real neat. When he reached inside his coat and fished out a kerchief to wipe his mouth, Lucky almost laughed. But he found himself gazing at Dalfon’s expressive mouth and strong hands. The first time Dalfon had kissed him, it nearly bowled Lucky over. No one had ever kissed him so passionately—hell, no man had ever kissed him at all before then. Lucky could feel the heat rising in his face as he recollected the shocking sensations.

  Dalfon glanced up, and for an instant his gaze held Lucky’s. He smiled, all assured and knowing, and Lucky looked quickly away. He glowered at a big clump of wild grass and the velvety moss next to it. His eyes lit on the sprawled legs of a spider as big as his hand. Lucky nearly jumped, but something in the perfect stillness of the huge bug stopped him.

  What he’d first taken for legs, he realized, were metallic spines splaying out from a cracked gray sphere. Black symbols of spells etched the surface of the silvery legs. The gray orb at the center flaked away like ash as a slight breeze rolled over the hill.

  Lucky turned back to Dalfon. “Is that the curse Frank Swaim cast on you?”

  “It is.” Dalfon took a mouthful of fish and frowned at the curse. “A nasty thing, and not cheap. The Swaims did me that much honor, I suppose. That’s made from electrum—silver-and-gold alloy. Quite a pretty sight when it was first made, I imagine. Before I burned it out, there was an orb of solid alchemic stone big as a plum at the heart of it.”

  Lucky didn’t know much about spells or alchemic stone. They and holy books were the tools of learned theurgists, not mages. But he did know alchemic stone powered the mechanical spells theurgists crafted, and pure stone was more valuable than diamonds.

  He extended his hand to touch the ash, wondering if there might still be a pure shard of the precious mineral within. Dalfon caught his arm.

  “Don’t,” Dalfon said. “I burned out the curse’s source of power, but the spells are still intact.”

  “But it’s dead—”

  “Not dead, just sleeping. Someone like you could bring it back to life with the touch of your finger.” Dalfon frowned at the curse. With him leaning so close, Lucky smelled the soot and blood staining Dalfon’s coat. “Back in the bad old days of castles and knights, theurgists used to wire mages up to their spells and burn through them instead of alchemic stone. Even now most spells come alive when they’re touched by a mage. And a mage as handsome as you, well it might just fall in—”

  “Who said I was a mage?” Lucky demanded.

  “Nobody.” Dalfon gave a laugh as he released Lucky’s arm. “I’m just not a complete idiot.”

  “So you say.” The instant Lucky got the words out, he regretted them. Not because they’d impact Dalfon one bit, but it was a childish response and so obviously untrue that it embarrassed him.

  Dalfon didn’t even dignify it with a rejoinder.

  Lucky folded his arms over his crossed legs and glared into the fire. Gold flames devoured lengths of white driftwood like a funeral pyre consuming bare bones.

  Hardly a foot away, Dalfon ate quietly and then cleared away the fern fronds and fish bones. A moment later, he returned to the fi
re and settled beside Lucky. Lucky felt intensely aware of Dalfon despite the fact he refused to look at him. Somewhere off in the wooded hills, a whip-poor-will sang out. It struck Lucky as somehow meaningful that the bird’s courting song sounded so sad and lonely.

  “You know what that is right up there?” Dalfon pointed to the twinkling light above the horizon.

  “The evening star,” Lucky replied.

  “That’s one name. It’s also called Venus, after a goddess of love.” Dalfon offered the bright star a fond smile, like they were old friends. “But I call it my Lucky star. Whenever I look at it, I think of you.”

  “Sure you do.” Lucky rolled his eyes. “Every single night you just look up there and think of me, even when you’re fucking sheep herders and miners.”

  Dalfon had the audacity to cast Lucky a reproachful glance, like Lucky owed it to him to lap up his sweet-talk after three years. Dalfon tossed a green twig into the fire, and the smell of searing sap filled the column of smoke. A few moments passed, and Dalfon’s silence began to annoy Lucky, like a scab he knew he shouldn’t scratch but couldn’t keep from picking at.

  “So what did you do to piss off the Swaims?” Lucky asked at last.

  Dalfon rubbed the tattered front of his coat, then threw another twig onto the fire. It snapped and popped in the flames.

  “I don’t rightly know,” Dalfon said. “Though I have a strong suspicion.”

  “How can you not know how you made someone want to murder you?”

  “Well, I seem to have a talent for it.” Dalfon glanced to him and held his gaze. “Because I don’t know what I did to infuriate you aside from coming back like I promised I would.”

  “Promised? Like you promised?” Lucky actually sputtered in outrage. Then he jabbed Dalfon in the chest. “What you promised was to meet me at the Edgewater Station, first thing in the morning! And I went and I waited. I waited for you all damn day! You never bothered to show!”

  Dalfon stared at Lucky, looking strangely surprised and confused. Then his expression turned bleak, and he shook his head.

  “You never got my letter.” He said it softly, almost like he was talking to himself. “Effie never gave you my letter…”

  “You didn’t write me no letter—” Lucky cut himself short as he looked into Dalfon’s face. He read an absolute and mournful certainty—the kind of realization that seized a man like an undertow and drowned his hope in an instant. Lucky had worn that expression himself after he’d broken the seal on that beautiful golden envelope, expecting to find a precious missive from his mother. Hoping that he could at last go home to her.

  Instead he’d read prim condolences from a nurse who’d tended her in the tuberculosis sanatorium. Lucky understood that stricken expression down to the very marrow of his bones.

  All the righteous anger brewing in his gut went cold.

  “I never got no letter,” Lucky said quietly. “Effie came down with scarlet fever. She was burning up when I got home, and she hardly recognized me and Molly. Five days later she was gone.” The raw sorrow and feeling of failure washed over Lucky as he remembered holding his emaciated sister’s body in his arms and weeping. Lucky’s eyes stung but he pulled himself together. He wasn’t about to break down crying in front of Dalfon.

  “Lucky, I’m so sorry.” For a rare moment Dalfon seemed truly at a loss. “She was such a bright little thing. I can hardly imagine her…”

  “She hung on to me so hard. Maybe she was trying to tell me…” Lucky cleared his throat and wiped at his eyes. He couldn’t keep thinking about it. “After that, Pa Spivey set fire to everything of hers to keep the fever from catching.”

  “So, all this time you thought…” Dalfon trailed off.

  Lucky couldn’t hold his gaze.

  He’d thought the worst. It hadn’t even crossed his mind that something might have happened to Dalfon or that messages between them might have gotten lost. He’d made fun of the lovers in Dalfon’s story of Romeo and Juliet for such foolishness, and still he hadn’t given it a moment’s consideration. He’d just been so sure that a man like Dalfon couldn’t really love a fellow like himself.

  Dalfon had brought so much joy into his life. But somehow Lucky hadn’t been able to believe it could last. And when he’d thought Dalfon had left him, he hadn’t felt surprised but almost resigned to the heartbreak. He hadn’t questioned it or looked for Dalfon, because what would have been the point? He’d only have roused his own hopes to have them inevitably crushed again.

  He was always abandoned. That had been the only certainty in all his chaotic life.

  Lucky scowled down at the dirty nails of his hands, a terrible guilt and frustration churning through him, twisting the grief of his sister’s death with his heartbreak over Dalfon. He hadn’t been able to defeat the raging fire of her fever, and he’d wasted three years silently cursing Dalfon and hating himself for not being able to forget him. He wanted to howl at the sky, but what good would that do?

  “What’d it say?” Lucky asked. “The letter, I mean?”

  “I might have lifted a line from Mr. Whitman. ‘I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only’.” Dalfon lay back in the wild grass. He gazed up at the stars like he’d done on the raft. “Of course I promised that I’d change my rambling, no-good ways if you would just trust me. Give me two weeks to recover and join me in Chicago at the Castle Hotel. I enclosed a twenty-dollar bill.”

  “Wait, what did you have to recover from?” Lucky thought of the scarlet fever that had taken Effie. It horrified him to think of Dalfon all alone burning up like that, waiting for him.

  Dalfon looked a little self-conscious but then smiled.

  “I don’t much like admitting it, but I’d taken something of a beating. Though you can bet the bellhop at the Castle was pretty impressed when I claimed I’d come by my bruises and split lip wrestling a tornado out of my way.”

  Lucky felt sure Dalfon was right, but that still didn’t answer his question. He couldn’t have been roughed up by Killer Curtis. The outlaw hadn’t even pulled his gun when Dalfon had shot him down. Everyone said so.

  “Did Curtis’s brother come after you?” Lucky asked.

  “Jimmy? No. He took off the minute Curtis hit the ground, and as far as I know he’s still running.” Dalfon sighed. “It was Pa Spivey and two of his friends. They came after me behind the saloon.”

  “Pa?” Lucky couldn’t imagine Pa Spivey had taken offense at seeing a murderer like Killer Curtis meet his end. “Why?”

  “Why do you think? You followed me around like a second shadow and were always giving me those hungry looks—”

  “I didn’t!” Lucky felt a guilty flush spread across his face. Sure, he’d trailed Dalfon, but he hadn’t been as obvious about it as a lot of the girls or even Mrs. Margot Swaim.

  “Yes, you did.” Oddly, Dalfon laughed. Then he rolled up onto one elbow. “And so did I, all right! I was just as caught up as you were. Probably more so, because what the hell was I doing hanging around a dismal swamp town for months for except to be with you?

  “So of course Pa Spivey got suspicious and started spying on us. When he jumped me, I knew the only choices I had were either to shoot him dead or get the hell out of town. I wasn’t about to murder your pa—adopted or not. So…so, I left you. But I gave Effie a letter for you first. I swear I did.”

  Lucky nodded. Three years he’d been so angry and hurt, and all that time Dalfon had probably been feeling the same for being stood up at the hotel.

  “What did you do when I didn’t show in Chicago?” Lucky asked.

  “I waited. Kept hoping you’d come.” Dalfon shook his head. “After three weeks I couldn’t afford to stay any longer. I figured you feared that we wouldn’t be able to make lives for ourselves. That I wasn’t a reliable man to risk so much on. Then I reckoned
that you were probably right.”

  “But I didn’t think anything of the sort,” Lucky protested.

  “Well, I realize that now.” Dalfon laughed, then went on. “But at the time it made me reconsider the life I’d been leading. Living by my gun, constantly on the road hunting bounties for anyone who could pay. I wasn’t much better than the outlaws I took down, was I?”

  Lucky thought he had been. Better than a lot of the respectable men of Edgewater too. Certainly better than the Swaim brothers. But saying as much would just make him sound foolish, he supposed.

  “What’d you decide then?” Lucky asked.

  “I realized that I had to actually make good on those changes I’d promised to make in the letter you never read.” Dalfon gave another dry laugh, then reached into his coat and drew out a star-shaped badge. “I had to find a lawful way to provide for and protect us both. Then come back and give you a better offer.”

  Dalfon handed the silver badge to Lucky. It felt heavy and warm in his hand. A halo of square letters surrounded the star and proclaimed the bearer to be a detective in the Pinkerton Agency as well as a licensed theurgist.

  “I worked my ass off for that,” Dalfon said. “Hunted train robbers across both halves of America, rescued a foreign prince from his abductor—which it turned out was his secret wife. That’s not even counting all the studying I had to do for the theurgy test.”

  “Don’t you have to be a Bible-thumper to get a license?” Lucky hadn’t pegged Dalfon for the religious type, despite him being the son of a rabbi.

  “Naw. There’s plenty of holy books that aren’t Christian and still contain powerful spells. In fact, being familiar with Hebrew gave me a leg up on most the other students when it came to the Tanakh.”

  Lucky nodded warily. The idea that Dalfon had become a theurgist filled him with misgivings. Dalfon knew he was a mage now, for certain.

  “You ain’t gonna put a collar on me, are you?” Lucky asked at last.