For a moment, it was quiet.
A low cloud of red dust hung between Midas and the stranger. Neither man blinked. There was no question who the stranger was looking at, no doubt about what he saw.
Midas waved his guns.
The men pulled the buck to the edge of the brimming pit, the heels of his scruffy boots not more than an inch from the precipice.
Midas took aim.
Two sharp clicks sounded as he cocked his pistols.
For a long moment, everything was very quiet. Midas smiled, letting the ominous silence hang there between him and the buck.
And then the buck’s shaggy boots started to scream.
Lie turned away from the window just as the white goblin cocked his pistols. She could not bear to watch her dark man die.
She wanted to weep, but this was no time for tears. There was no time for anything now. No time for sadness, no time for dreams. Only time to take what Father wanted. Take as much of it as she could carry.
Find a horse.
Escape before the white goblin came for her.
She moved on her tiny feet as always – slowly, carefully. Even the smallest steps were excruciatingly painful, each one a sharpened shard of bamboo piercing her foot. She was as unsteady as a babe, but she did not stop, did not allow herself to fall.
Across the room she moved. Slowly, carefully. She reached the palace of the Empress Dowager and removed the structure’s roof.
Inside was the stink of the white goblin’s gold.
Gold coins. Paper money, too.
And on top of it all, an abacus made of human bone.
Lie’s breath caught in her throat. She snatched up the horrid thing and threw it against the wall. The abacus shattered. Pieces fell, scattering across the floor. Only when the last sliver of bone rolled to a stop did she breathe again.
Slowly, carefully, she moved to the closet. Opened the door. Rummaged around.
The carpetbag she found in one corner stank of the white goblin, but it was empty. Soon she had filled it. Some gold, but mostly paper money. Riches as light as foolish laughter.
The goblin had burned her clothes, but it took no time at all to slip into one of his shirts, which on her was almost as long as a dress.
Fistfuls of gold coins had rolled into one low corner of the room, a magical pond shimmering there. Paper money was scattered on the floor like the leaves of autumn.
She knew that she should find a match. Burn some of the paper money. An offering to the Gods, for luck . . . But what she needed most of all was time. Only time could make her luck.
Lie knew no God of time, so she hurried onward.
Midas prodded the stranger’s shaggy boots with the barrel of his pistol. Stitched wings flapped madly. Beady red-black eyes glared up at Midas and his gun-dogs. Angry shrieks spilled from midnight lips. Razor teeth chattered like castanets as two-dozen tiny mouths snapped open and closed, longing for the taste of human flesh.
“Jesus!” one of the gun-dogs said. “His boots are made outta bats!”
Midas whispered, “I’ll be damned.”
“That’s a fact,” the stranger said.
Midas sneered at the black gunman. Four of the gun-dogs had ahold of the boy, pinning him to the ground. He wasn’t going anywhere, him and his smart mouth.
Midas grinned. Suddenly, he was real disinterested in the gunslinging buck.
The buck’s boots, though . . . now they were another story.
Again Midas poked at the fanged horrors, running the pistol barrel through a wave of bristly black hair, over a ridge of dangerous teeth. One of the hideous little mouths snapped closed, taking hold of the gun, chewing, razor teeth squealing over polished metal.
A held breath escaped Midas’s lips. Hell and damnation. He couldn’t believe it. Down in his drawers, his beaver rifle was getting real stiff, just the way it did when he got to studying one of those mail-order catalogs from the fancy ladies’ footwear emporiums back East.
Squinting, Midas studied the sin-black soles of the stranger’s boots from heel to toe. The rancher’s eye was well-trained when it came to such matters, and these gunboats appeared to be just about his size.
Such magnificent footwear could not be consigned to the bottom of a shit shaft, that was for damn sure.
“Get them things off his feet,” Midas ordered.
The gun-dogs regarded the writhing horrors – leathery wings flapping against tight stitches, teeth whipsawing this way and that in all those awful little mouths, nasty little screams slicing the evening air.
In a couple of eyeblinks, almost every hand had found a pocket in which to hide.
Midas spit in the dirt. “Damn your yella hides, boys.”
Red Bailey was the only gun-dog to be cowed by the insult. He snatched a bowie from his boot and offered, “Maybe I’ll just take ’em off at the nigger’s ankles.”
“We’d still have to get his feet out of ’em.”
“Then how about I just slice the damn things apart,” Red said. “We can sew ’em back together later.”
“No.” Midas scratched his chin. He needed some answers. Maybe there was a trick to getting the damn boots off of the buck’s feet. But if there was, the buck wasn’t going to tell him about it. And the threat of another beating was useless, because the buck had already stood up to the best they could offer. Besides, the poor boy had to know by now that he was bound to die, any way you figured it.
A grin creased Midas’ face. He should have thought of it before.
“Don’t do a thing ’til I get back,” he said, starting toward the house.
Lie slipped into the hallway, one hand on the wall, one hand holding the carpetbag. Swaying on her tiny feet, but moving forward. Gritting her teeth against pain that sliced and stabbed. Searching for a way out of the house other than the front door.
There were many rooms in the white goblin’s house. Too many. Like a Chinese palace where the rooms connected in almost impossible ways, designed by crafty architects who hoped to trap an eternity of luck.
Somewhere far behind her, she heard the front door opening. Then she heard the white goblin’s voice. “Those boots your nigger is wearing,” he said, and Lie heard his footsteps whispering over the Indian carpet in the main room, his boot heels ringing on the hardwood hallway that led to the bedroom. “I like the goddamn things. I really like ’em.” She listened as the bedroom door squealed open on dry hinges. “I want you to come outside with me, show me how he takes ’em off without getting his fingers chewed down to the nub – ”
The white goblin’s footfalls stopped suddenly. Lie could imagine the twisted expression on his face, his anger boiling as he realized that she was not in the bedroom.
His voice was like thunder. “Where the hell are you!”
She stumbled down the hallway, searching for an exit, each step agony. Behind her, heavy footsteps shook the house. Still, she did not slow her pace. Not until the white goblin himself turned a sharp corner. Not until his great shadow covered her like a shroud.
He made a grab for the carpetbag, but Lie refused to surrender easily. She forced him to fight for it. He had to pry it from her hand, finger by finger.
His free hand closed around her neck. “I paid for you!” he shouted. “You’re my property! Lock, stock, and barrel! That’s the deal!”
He raised his hand, almost slapped her.
She could not decide why he did not.
A great sigh escaped him. “Goddamn me for giving you my heart,” he said. His eyes filled with poison as he spoke, and she wished that he would have slapped her instead.
“Get back to the bedroom,” he ordered. “Our bedroom. Get into that white dress. The one I had made special. Under the bed, in a pink box, you’ll find some little white booties to go with it. They’ve got pearls on ’em. I ordered ’em special from Chicago, from an outfit makes baby booties and such for rich folks. Get into those, too.”
She only stared at him.
“I know you understand
me,” he said, marching down the hallway, tossing the carpetbag into a room with a doorway so small it might as well not have been there at all.
The white goblin turned a corner.
All that remained was the sound of his footsteps.
The creak of the front door.
A door he did not have to slam.
Midas stood on the porch, staring up at the sky.
The heavens had gone all angry with the sunset, violet sky warring with black-fisted clouds that hooked and uppercutted against the wind, the sun sinking down slow and easy and kind of timid, like it was plumb worn out and didn’t have much of a notion to do anything about it.
At his feet were buckets of beer and whiskey bottles by the dozen. To his side stood a player piano from a whorehouse in Fiddler proper, borrowed especially for the grand occasion. Overhead, paper lanterns swayed from the eaves of the Gerlach homestead. The lanterns glowed just as red as red could be, painted with Chi-nee characters that symbolized happiness and love, and not just your everyday garden-variety happiness and love, but happiness and love of the eternal variety.
Midas spit over the rail, into the dust.
Fifty feet straight on waited several rows of long tables covered over with red-and-white checkerboard tablecloths, each one set with china plates and real silver utensils, each one ready with more buckets of beer and whiskey bottles by the dozen. Beyond the tables was a cooking pit, dug down but not too deep, heaped with good oak that had long since burned down to a serious bed of coals. Midas’ men had borrowed a couple of jailhouse doors from the sheriff’s lockup in Fiddler, and with these they had covered over the pit. Several dead hogs kept company with a couple dead cows and a few dead lambs there on the bars, each carcass roasting to black perfection. The smell was all blood and iron, and it made Midas’ head swim.
“Boss? You okay? Can you hear me, boss?”
Midas blinked several times, glancing down. The buck bounty man stood at the foot of the porch steps, still smiling as proud as proud could be even though a half-dozen guns were aimed at his nappy head.
Midas grinned himself, figuring that this stranger must have had one hell of a smoke wagon hanging between his legs to be kicking up the sand at this late date.
“What you want us to do with this here nigger, Mr Gerlach?”
The grin went soft on Midas’ face. He actually started to shake, because somehow he knew that this uppity, grinnin’ buck was responsible for ruining everything.
Sure. That was the way it was. The buck had been the burr under his saddle, all along. It was the buck’s fault that the Chinaman’s daughter had been disobedient. That had to be it . . . there was nothing in the Chinaman’s letters to explain it otherwise. The buck must have put ideas into her poor little head, convincing her to steal from her husband-to-be.
Yeah. The buck had hatched the whole scheme.
And that wasn’t the only damage he’d done. It was the stranger’s fault that Midas’ own men were now staring at him with snickering little grins branded on their faces, just as it was the stranger’s fault that Midas Gerlach was standing before them, shaking like a sissified gent. Standing there on his own front porch, on his wedding day, his big ol’ puppy-dog of a heart breaking with the knowledge that the bloom was off the fucking rose.
For ever more. Amen.
Without warning, Midas erupted. A torrent of words gushed over his lips. He shouted about blood and honor and true love and outré oriental practices, and he couldn’t seem to put a cork in it. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t rein in a single syllable. He took great solace in the fact that a gun was in his hand, for he was certain that he was going to use it in just a minute or maybe less, and then he would surely shut up. But there were some things that needed saying before he sent this buck straight to hell.
Innumerable things. And Midas was saying each and every one of them, though his brain didn’t have one damn thing to do with it. The words were bubbling up direct from his guts, and he couldn’t control them any more than a holy roller can control himself when he’s caught up in the spirit and chattering in tongues. The words were jumping and leapfrogging and somersaulting right on out of Midas’ mouth – each and every one of them racing hellbent for the ears of his audience – but at the same time they were filling him up, too, filling him so full that he was sure to bust if he didn’t pretty quickly cock the hammer and let fly with an avalanche of lead.
Midas looked away, just for a second, just to catch his breath.
And there she was. A real vision. Standing in the doorway, all white like the pearly gates of God’s own heaven. The Chinaman’s daughter was wearing the wedding gown Midas had bought for her, waiting there beneath the red paper lanterns that glowed with promised happiness and love of the eternal variety.
She wore pearl booties on her pretty little feet – those delicate booties that had come all the way from Chicago – the booties Midas had hidden under his stinking bed like a well-kept promise.
The Chinaman’s daughter held out one dainty hand to him, her beautiful fingers painted red by glowing lantern-light. There was no way around it. Midas’s cursed heart sang with joy. His anger melted at the sight of her, for he’d been imagining this moment just this way since the arrival of the Chinaman’s first letter.
Midas stumbled toward her like some big stupid kid, and suddenly it was as if he were floating on air, as if his big clumsy Monitor and Merrimack gunboat feet weren’t touching the ground at all.
Red Bailey called out, “What about the nigger’s boots?”
“Forget ’em,” Midas said, taking the hand of his Chi-nee princess.
“What about the nigger proper, then? You want us to kill what’s left of him? Or you want us to save him for you?”
Midas didn’t give one good goddamn what his gun-dogs did, and he told them so.
For a time he imagined that he was back in that church Down South, the one with the black Jesus. It seemed in his reverie that Jesus lay on the pew next to his, and it was a hot day, August hot –
No. Worse than that. Brimstone hot. Hell hot. That’s what it was.
Jesus wasn’t holding up too well. He’d been born in a land of deserts, but He couldn’t take this. Whimpering like a babe in arms, He was. Why, Stack was pure embarrassed for the old boy. He wanted to tell Him to muscle up and bear it, the way He’d borne that crown of thorns while nailed up there on the church wall through the long years of Stack’s childhood, but he was so dry he figured he’d have to be primed before he could spit, let alone talk.
So Stack just lay there in the heat, taking it himself.
Just like Daddy had promised he’d do one day, and the fact that his daddy was long dead and buried didn’t keep the old man from reminding him. “See,” he said, whispering in his son’s ear, “told you how you’d end up, didn’t I? Told you it’d be the pit for you, you with your evil ways. You at the gate now, ain’t cha, boy? Take a look, see what’s on the other side.”
Stack wanted a look, a good long one. He’d heard about this place for a long, long time. He’d had the fear of it beat into him ever since he could remember. And now that he was here he wanted to see if all the fear had been worth it, if the short time he’d stood on two legs like a man was indeed cause for eternal punishment. He wanted to find out if the stark reality of his final destination would have made it easier to bow and scrape. He wanted to know if such knowledge would have made it easier to spend his life in lame servitude of one kind or another, in shame, apologizing for his very birth.
“Go ahead, boy,” his daddy said. “Look through the gate.”
He got one eye open. Sweet Jesus, he could see the fires. Feel them, too. One cheek pressed against the very bars that formed the gate, and that cheek was sizzling like bacon on a hot griddle.
“I warned you, boy. Didn’t I warn you? But you wouldn’t listen. Not one word did you hear. If you’d led the right life. If you’d been meek, like a lamb, you’d have been right, and the Lord woul
d be forgivin’ you about right now, and you’d be enterin’ His Kingdom on your knees, the way He intended.”
“Easy on him, preacher,” Jesus said. “We forgive, Me and Mine. Your boy wasn’t a bad one. He wasn’t evil. He just never wanted to crawl, is all. And now that he’s done . . . Well, when you’re done, you’re done straight through. And then there’s no turning back.”
Even the preacher knew better than to talk back to Jesus. The preacher’s son was thankful for that little miracle, especially seeing as how Jesus had been kind enough to accompany him to the gates of hell.
Stack figured he should thank the Good Lord’s boy for that. He pushed away from the bars, turned toward the place His voice had come from.
A pig stared back at him with blind eyes, head charred, a well-cooked apple sizzling in its mouth. The pig did not utter a single word, and Stack had the strong suspicion that it wasn’t just the apple that kept the dead hog from talking.
The porker was ready for the knife and fork. Lying above coals that were a long way from brimstone but burned hell-hot nonetheless. Lying there on a scorcher of a grill with a few lambs which had no doubt come to the fire real meek and mild, a bunch of other hogs, a couple cows, and one really stupid bastard for company.
And then came the laughter. “Stick a fork in the nigger and see if he’s done.”
The gun-dog who held the fork obliged. He jabbed Stack’s shoulder, giving the big fork a generous twist. There were only two tines, each one just short of two inches in length, but they bit and sliced like the devil’s own pitchfork. Stack nearly passed out as pain stampeded his senses.
“It’s like they say, bucko,” the holder of the fork opined. “When you’re done, you’re done straight through. And it appears that you still got mucho momentos to go ’fore you’re cooked up good and proper, amigo.”
The men’s laughter mixed right in there with the pain. Stack grimaced. He’d stared through the gates of hell, lain on those gates with the other dead animals, the stupid creatures that went through life meek and mild, but nothing burned him quite the way the hyena laughter of these two fools did.
That was when he knew, for sure and for certain, with no questions at all. He was done, all right. Done, once and for all.
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