The coyoteman showed a healthy set of teeth – not a smile, but an animal trying to smile. “Most folks think I’m crazy, sayin’ somethin’ like that,” he continued. “But I ain’t crazy. I got the devil in my blood. My own mama told me so. See, my daddy was a coyote. Like I said, like my mama said – it’s in my blood. Mr Gerlach – that’s my boss – he reads all kinds of books. He knows about such things. He says what I am is what you call a liecanthrowup.”
“That’s a mouthful,” the black man said, and he didn’t so much as grin.
“That’s me, all right.” The coyoteman nodded, brushing his chin with his escaped brother’s amputated tail. “And believe you me, it ain’t easy bein’ part ky-ote. Hard to find work when your blood’s got the fever like mine. Folks think you’re peculiar, just ’cause you want to live in a hole in the ground and take your food raw, which is the way God served it up, ain’t it? But Mr Gerlach, he saw a use for me right off. Coyotes ain’t thinnin’ the newborn calves from Mr Gerlach’s herd like they once did, not with yours truly around. Pretty soon I’ll have the whole pack headin’ for greener . . . uh, I should say redder pastures.”
With the last comment, the coyoteman flipped the bloody tail at his audience as if it were an obscene exclamation point. He howled laughter, and it took a long time for him to stop, because he was waiting for the people in the wagon to join in the joke. But they managed to abstain. The black man was busy staring down the road, and his companion had slapped open her iron fan and was pumping it in the coyoteman’s direction.
The black man asked, “Where is Midas Gerlach’s ranch?”
The coyoteman raised the pelt that covered his thin belly and expertly pinched a flea into eternity. “You’re standin’ on it, pilgrim. You look around, and on a clear day you can see until tomorrow. And it’s Midas Gerlach owns every inch of what you’re seeing.”
“And where exactly does Mr Gerlach hang his hat?”
“Five miles down this road. Can’t see his place from here, but it’s there. But a man like you don’t want to go down this road.” The coyoteman wrinkled his nose and sniffed the stranger’s boots, which bristled with wiry hairs and sharp white ridges that looked like pure misery – bones or teeth, the coyoteman couldn’t rightly decide which, and he didn’t really want to move close enough to make a thorough investigation. “I can smell you, pilgrim,” he said by way of conclusion. “And whatever scent I’m readin’, it ain’t rabbit.”
The black man didn’t reply. He stared at the road, at the dead coyote wrapped around the base of the nearby pole. Scant minutes ago the creature had been leading the hunt. But now . . .
The coyoteman said, “You’re lookin’ at the wrong end of that pole, friend.”
The stranger looked up and saw for the first time the thing the night had hidden, the thing that was more than plain in the morning light – a severed head leering down at him from the crown of the pole.
“Pinkerton men came through a week ago,” the coyoteman explained, pointing to another pole a quarter-mile or so distant. “Five of ’em. They didn’t smell like rabbits either. Not until Mr Gerlach got done with ’em, that is. Skinned rabbits was what they smelled like at the end. And believe you me, they was ready for the stew-pot.” He giggled. “You ever hear a rabbit scream? Well, have yuh?”
If he had known what the coming hours would bring, the stranger might have searched his memory for an answer to that question. But though he knew many things that other men did not, he did not know the future, so he tugged the reins.
The horses moved forward. The coyoteman walked beside the wagon, his hand raised against the rising sun. “You listen to me,” he said. “You pay attention! Mr Gerlach, he treated them Pinkerton men just like I treat the coyotes.” The black man slapped the ribbons, the team broke into a trot, and so did the coyoteman. “Mr Gerlach’s got a fever in his blood, even worse than mine. But his misery ain’t from a coyote . . . it’s from his family.” The wagon passed another pole crowned with a severed head – generous golden tresses in imitation of George Armstrong Custer, bullet hole three inches behind the left ear in imitation of Abraham Lincoln. “People tell stories just like coyotes, but these stories are true! The whole Gerlach family done been blood crazy for years . . . cousin marryin’ cousin . . . brother and . . . it just ain’t what’s meant to be.” The coyoteman was sprinting now, nearly breathless. “Why, you just look in the family plot and you’ll see . . . Mr Gerlach’s granddaddy buried right next to his own daughter . . . and . . .”
The driver hollered at the team, cracking the ribbons with real authority now. The horses raced forward, and the coyoteman tried to keep the pace. There were many things he wanted to say. He wanted to tell the driver about Midas Gerlach’s granddaddy, how Midas’s grandma had taken after him with a butcher knife. Cut off the old reprobate’s willie and tossed it right down the shit shaft one cold winter’s night, shortly after the old fool had threatened to bless his daughter with a baby brother for thirteen-year-old Midas. The coyoteman wanted to say all these things, just as he wanted to keep on running, but his lungs were working like a bellows with a couple of holes in it, and his legs were like those of a sickly kitten, and all he could say was, “Midas is . . . Midas is . . . he’s crazy with the blood . . .”
The coyoteman stumbled to a stop and doubled over, dropping the rifle and the coyote-head helmet, hands locking over his knees as he gasped for breath. The coyote was hiding in his blood, and he couldn’t keep up with the wagon, which was gone with the shadows, with the last cool breath of morning.
The sun beat down and there was nowhere to hide. “You got to understand,” the man said, because he had to finish even if no one could hear him. “How it is . . . with Mr Gerlach and folks around these parts. It’s like me and the coyotes . . . it’s like . . .”
But he was bone-tired now, like he always was after a hunt. Ready for the cool hollow of his burrow. He mopped his forehead with the coyote tail. Then he shed his furry shirt, wrapped the coyote headpiece around it, and tucked the bundle under one arm. Rifle in hand, he trudged up the road.
And though he panted, he kept his tongue in his mouth.
Late afternoon. The unrelenting sun beat through the window, warming the young woman’s nakedness like the fires of heaven.
Her tits were truly the color of alabaster. That the Chinaman had promised, though Midas Gerlach hadn’t believed him until now. Midas had bought the woman through the mail – bargaining, waiting as each offer and counter-offer traveled by stage and train from Fiddler to San Francisco or vice versa. He had committed the Chinaman’s descriptive poetry to heart, but he hadn’t dared believe it. He’d read plenty of yellowback novels and he knew that, numero uno, Chinamen were given to poetic excess and, numero dos, Chi-nee women were as yellow as the first corn of the season.
But it wasn’t like that with the woman who lay on Midas’ bed. If you judged by her, the Chinaman’s promises were as bankable as cash on the barrelhead. Lie’s tits were the color of alabaster, and they were round and perfect and as hard as any rock God had put on His green earth. Better still, Lie went on from there, her body pure poetry that Midas hadn’t found in any letter. Her nipples were as meaty as jerky, and she complained not at all as he took each in turn between his tobacco-stained teeth, stretching those tiny mounds of Chi-nee jerky into a ten-course meal, which was an image that had never crossed the poetic Chinaman’s mind.
Quick corner-of-the-eye glances filled Midas’ mind with other images. Lie’s fingers digging into the feather bed, knuckles bleached bone white, nails chewed to the quick. Her fan lying open on the floor in a puddle of sunshine, a heavy iron thing that only an inscrutable Chi-nee would invent. His gun belt hanging from the bedpost just above her left hand, but she wasn’t the kind to go reaching for it even though she carried an iron fan that could probably bust bones as efficiently as a railroad brakeman’s club. No. She was hiding. Eyelids closed, brow straining for high cheekbones like fingers strain for palms
when a desperate man makes a fist. Lips drawn back, lavender tongue clamped between her teeth with the same studied effort Midas trained on her nipples.
Thin tangle of brush between her legs like an undertaker’s dark thread, like the crimped legs of a dozen dead black widow spiders.
Nipple between his teeth, Midas grinned. Hell and damnation and dreams that come true. A woman who’d take her man without question or complaint. A woman who wasn’t capable of such nonsense. A woman who had been as mute as the day was long since she’d slipped from between her mama’s legs below decks on a ship bound for the land of gold mountains.
The beauty and voice of a flower. That was the Chinaman’s poetry, as haunting as the work of Mr Edgar Allan Poe.
A ten-course jerky meal and the music of smacking lips. That was Midas Gerlach’s poetry. A barroom limerick.
Yessiree. The Chinaman had taken the ass-end of the deal, all right. And the best waited below. Midas’ tongue traveled the length of Lie’s belly. Through the tangle of undertaker’s thread, down one firm alabaster thigh. He threw back the sheet – a clean one, catalog-bought and saved expressly for this occasion. Two teeny little stumps waited at the base of Lie’s ankles, both of them just as white as white could be, each one dotted with five little nubbins twisting this way and that, wriggling this little piggy went to market, this little piggy went to town . . .
Midas took one toe between his lips, then another. This little piggy had roast beef . . . this little piggy had none. Suckled like a contented baby. Wee wee wee . . . all the way home.
Home. China was a world away, but in his heart of hearts Midas knew that he belonged there. With his face buried in yellowback adventure novels he’d loved since he was just a sprout, he often dreamed of foreign shores even though his dead granddaddy’s voice still rang in his head. Those books ain’t manly things. Maybe that’s the way it was in the San Joaquin Valley shitsplat called Fiddler, California, but it wasn’t that way everywhere. Midas liked to read about Chinamen and their ways. He understood them – them with their dungeons and concubines and silk robes heavy with the perfume of opium. Even though he was a white man and a Christian, he understood the things those yellow men liked to do.
Wonderful things. Outré oriental practices that the book writers barely dared relate. Veiled descriptions which trapped Midas’s breath in his throat. Wicked scimitars that could split a man dandruff to dingleberry with one stroke. Opium dreams that taught a man the truth of his heart. Wives by the dozen, each one familiar with the taste of the whip. And best of all, feet sculpted like those at the base of Lie’s alabaster legs, tender young feet wrapped with long strips of silk. Ribbons circling tighter, tighter, tight as a Merry Christmas that never comes.
Bound feet. Saving part of a little girl for ever and ever in a grown woman’s body.
Midas closed his eyes. Suddenly he wasn’t the biggest fish in the little pond called Fiddler, California. He wasn’t a man who ate flapjacks for breakfast and broke horses with a brakeman’s club and drank cheap tequila out of a whore’s high-button shoe and shot down drummers in the local saloons if they so much as cracked a smile when he got to studying their assortments of ladies’ footwear.
For in his mind’s eye Midas was a man who eschewed denim, preferring garments fashioned from the finest oriental silk. His hair was oiled with strange perfumes instead of barber’s tonic. His bed chamber was heavy with the spicy tang of incense. Not one whiff of tequila or horseshit or lonely man’s sweat assaulted his refined olfactory senses.
But, even in the pit of his reverie, it was still Lie’s toe that was trapped between his lips. The toe of a Chi-nee princess raised expressly for his pleasure.
Because, in the pit of his reverie, Midas Gerlach was the Emperor of China, and he suckled on that toe as if it were the tit of the Empress Dowager herself.
Eyes open now.
The coyote’s words had been wise, for this was not the way it was supposed to be.
Breasts raw and red. Thin line of blood weeping from tongue.
She could not speak, but she could hear. Too well. Each little sound was amplified a hundredfold. Father said that evil spirits had stolen her voice when she was still in her mother’s belly, so the Gods had given her the hearing of a dragon in return.
White man sucking. A hungry man slurping noodles. Skin of a ghost hanging loosely from his bones like clean laundry flapping on a hot August breeze. Blue veins. Cold hands. Ghost hands. But his teeth were sharp. The teeth of the hungry goblin from her mother’s midnight stories.
The goblin with brown hair curling over his chest and shoulders.
Hair the color of the herbalist’s bitter roots.
Herbs that made her retch but didn’t give her a voice.
Father said herbalist was a cheat.
Father took herbalist’s tongue with a hatchet.
Father’s justice.
But Father was not here to protect her. Father was in San Francisco with the white goblin’s money. Using it to take another’s money by now. That was the way of it. Sure as she’d never touch the hard earth of Father’s homeland. Sure as the white goblin was sucking her twisted toes.
His clothes on the floor. The shed hide of a goblin.
Her clothes in the fire, flame and ash.
And in the corner – towering over the palace of the Empress Dowager, a giant in the Empress’s own private courtyard – the pine woman stood waiting, not daring to shrink from the flames.
Waiting, pine body straining against a white dress of silk and lace. Dancing flames casting her pine shadow over the curving roof of the palace. White veil a bleached shadow over slivered lips.
In China, white was the color of mourning.
The goblin stopped his sucking. Opened his eyes. Nudged Lie’s raw, red breasts with his evil chin, licking his horrid pink lips.
Lie made the pine woman’s face her own. She traveled to a place deep inside herself, a secret place far from the white goblin’s house. A place where he could not reach her.
And from that place, for the first time, the young daughter of the Mysterious East caught the bitter scent of the white goblin’s hidden gold.
Midas knew his limit, and he’d done reached it.
Hurriedly, he rose and christened his bride-to-be. She just lay there and took it like a dream. He had to pick her up before she’d even move. He set her in front of the dresser mirror, and she stood there as still and stiff as the pine dressmaker’s dummy in the corner of the room. Midas had to pour water into the bowl for her, wet the cloth. But damned if he was going to wipe her down, and she seemed to know it. Cool cloth in her tiny hand, she got the idea and busied herself.
Midas watched her from behind, but she was perfect and demure and didn’t dare catch his eye in the mirror. Her eyes were downcast, staring into the depths of the reflection, studying the fire that burned in the fireplace behind her and the model of the Empress Dowager’s palace that dominated the floor of Midas’ bedroom.
Midas had lovingly assembled the model, recreating every detail from vivid descriptions found in one of his yellowback novels. He wanted to tell Lie about it – what the model meant to him, the dreams it held – but all that would have to wait. Right now he didn’t want to talk. He only wanted to drink in her beauty, which jerked him around like a stiff shot of tequila.
Sweat on her tight little buttocks, twin globes that were as slick and shiny as a couple of perfect pearls. From behind, she looked like an innocent little girl. And maybe she was. Haired over, but just barely. Spider-leg hairs. Hairs like undertaker’s thread.
No. Midas licked at the salty-sweet, faintly leatherish taste in his mouth. He closed his eyes and concentrated on a flavor that had no equal.
A sweet blossom’s flavour. The Chinaman’s own daughter. Or so the Chinaman said. But the Chinaman was a man who owned a gambling hall, and a man like that wasn’t exactly on intimate terms with the truth. That’s what a lawman up in San Francisco had told one of Midas’ gun-d
ogs.
But the Chinaman had been straight about the girl. Maybe not about the daughter part – maybe that part was supposed to make the deal more appealing in an outré oriental way, like the things described in those yellowback novels – but he’d been straight about the rest of it. He’d delivered. He’d sent the girl down from San Francisco in a wagon so there wouldn’t be any fuss or gossip at the train station, just like he’d promised.
Midas stepped past the dressmaker’s dummy, his hairy shoulder brushing the bridal gown he’d had made special for Lie. He stood next to it, tall and proud in the courtyard of the Empress Dowager’s palace, dwarfing the structure. Sunlight glinted off the sloping angles of a dozen golden roofs, warming Midas’ naked skin.
Midas was a man who could never get warm enough.
He stood in the sunlight, staring at the same scene that had greeted him every day for thirty-three years. The Gerlach family plot was a hundred feet from his window. His granddaddy’s headstone dwarfed those surrounding it, his mama’s headstone on one side and his grandma’s on the other. Only one thing was different about the scene today. There was a nigger out there on Midas’ property, about fifty feet this side of the family plot and another twenty paces or so to the west, pretty near the old outhouse where the best part of Midas’s granddaddy had been so shamefully interred lo those many years ago. This nigger had a shovel lashed to his shot-up hand with a length of barbed wire, and he was busy digging a new shit shaft in the hard, hot earth of Fiddler, California.
Midas scratched his head. Still all pixilated from his frolic with Lie, but Jesus, he needed to calm down and think this through.
The Chinaman had sent Lie, sure. But he’d also sent the nigger. Nigger had been the one driving the wagon.
But he wasn’t a wagon-driving kind of buck. Not hardly. He was a buck gunfighter. Buck bounty man, actually, to put the right name to it. A gunman with a Navy Colt secreted beneath his canvas duster. Imagine that. A wagon-driving buck with the stink of sweat and horseshit and trail dust about him trying to draw down on Midas Gerlach on the very ranch where three generations of Gerlachs had been born and bred.
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