“I told you I’m grateful, Mister Pargeter. Don’t want no more’n that.”
“So you say.”
“Well . . . might be I’d like to buy you breakfast, you was amenable, ’fore you ride off yonder.”
“Who says I’m leavin’?”
Now it was Charlie’s turn to hike a brow. “Who’d want to stay here, he didn’t have to?”
A good question, and one which came into even clearer relief when Chess saw the Widow waiting for him in her doorway, youngest child braced dozing between her and him like a shield.
“Don’t do nothin’ in my house, Mister Pargeter,” she asked him, “if you’d be so kind. Please.”
Nothin’ like magic, or nothin’ like ridin’ young Charles here ’til he pops? Chess thought, sourly. But he tipped his hat and agreed to her terms, which seemed to disappoint Charlie somewhat. That ain’t the Chess Pargeter I heard tell of!
Chess shrugged. Probably not, he thought.
Must’ve got over his dismay by morning, however, since he turned up back at the same not-quite-a-saloon done up twice as elaborate as the night before, like he was trying to show Chess who could shout “Lock up your sons!” the loudest.
“Don’t see Sam Holger,” Chess noted, glancing ’round, as he tucked into his eggs.
Charlie shook his head, coaxing a rippling run from his instrument, far prettier than most pauses. “Naw, don’t expect him to show his face for some time yet; he’ll want to make sure everybody who was there when you laid him low is elsewhere, so nobody’s ’round to cry lie on him when he starts in to claimin’ he kicked your ass.”
“So let him.”
“Couldn’t live with myself, if I did.”
“So you’ll risk getting killed over nothing, instead? Believe me, kid, Holger’s the exact type someone like you should keep away from, they want to stay upright — sort who won’t learn his lesson no matter how many times it’s repeated, or how hard.”
“Aw, he’s full of wind, is all. Been after me since we was knee-high, for reasons don’t stand lookin’ at. What duds I wear, what songs I play: be sort of funny, it wasn’t so damn sad.”
“That ain’t the sort of joke you laugh at, not ’less you got a gun to back your taste in humour up. ’Course, you bein’ somewhat of a fop probably doesn’t help, either.” Adding, gently, as Charlie stared up at him in utter confusion: “A clothes-horse, a dandy, like they said . . . fashionable beyond the proper bounds of sense, is what that means.”
“You get all your clothes store-made, or so I heard.”
“Don’t get ’em made at all, anymore — but yes, I used to. Still, you’ll note I ain’t the one of us wearin’ orange cowhide pants with brass buttons all up and down ’em, or a shirt embroidered with roses.”
Charlie shrugged. “Thought it’d suit me better to stand out as much as I can, since I don’t have no hope of bein’ passed over.”
“Now that, I understand. But if you’re gonna spend your whole life pickin’ fights, you need to know how to end ’em, not just start ’em.”
“You could teach me, I guess. If you wanted to.”
“If I wanted to, sure. You sayin’ I should?”
“I ain’t qualified to know what you should or shouldn’t, Mister Pargeter. Just . . .”
Just I’m the only other queer you ever met, let alone the only hex, Chess thought, suddenly exhausted, though it was hardly gone ten in the morning. Just like you look at me like I’m Jesus, like I could multiply fishes and turn water into wine — and Goddamn if I couldn’t, either. Goddamn if I couldn’t do any damn thing I want, even now.
It was a heavy burden, all this possibility. He didn’t remember ever feeling that way before, but maybe that was what coming back from the dead — twice, with different results both times — did for a fellow.
“Paradin’ ’round town dressed like that, let alone the rest, your Ma and Pa must’ve hated you somethin’ fierce,” Chess said, at last.
“By the end? I somewhat think they did. Named me after a king, though — Charlemagne, first of France: ‘Charles the big.’ Guess they hoped it’d fit.”
“Good thing you grew into it.”
That made Charlie preen a bit, which prompted Chess to crack another smile. But the next turn in their dance made it all slide side-a-ways, when Charlie asked: “You was . . . with Reverend Rook, is what I heard.”
“From them songs, and such? Sure was, and famous for it.”
“Dead, too, for some of that same time . . . that’s the other rumour.”
“That too, yeah. Twice over.”
“And then — you came back. Why?”
Didn’t care to stay prone, he thought, but didn’t say. “’Cause I still had work needed doin’,” he averred, instead.
“To kill him, then. For . . . killin’ you?”
“That was her idea,” Chess heard himself snap. After a moment, with difficulty: “Ash Rook didn’t need me to get himself killed. No more’n — ”
I needed him to get killed, myself.
Truth was, as Chess only just now understood he already well knew, if it hadn’t gone the way it did, it’d’ve gone one of a hundred others. Chess had been moving toward fatality all his life, all unknowing of the cost. The moment when his inborn payload finally exploded, destroying everything ’round him sure as double canister shot.
A bomb, a plague, one more slice of walking doom. One more hex in a world that hated hexes, all the more so whenever they managed not to hate each other, or themselves.
But now there was Hexicas, at least. And that, too, was Ash Rook’s work, along with all the rest.
“Wanted him dead, that’s true ’nough — a thousand times over, and more,” Chess concluded, his own voice so low, so rough, he barely recognized it. “But even that he took pride in deprivin’ me of, by the end. Judged himself by his bad Book’s standard, found himself wanting and passed sentence, ’fore I had a chance to do more’n curse him over it. For Asher Goddamn Rook never could stand to be outdone by anyone, at anything.”
Something on his cheek now, warm enough, but not wet: Charlie Alarid’s big hand, cupping his cheek and half his chin. One guitar string-callused thumb, tracing the track where tears would go, if only there were any left to shed.
“I’m sorry,” the kid said, and seemed to mean it. Chess shook his head.
“No need,” he replied. “I’m sorry enough for the both of us.”
The barkeep, gazing studiously elsewhere, let out a dry little prompting cough: Time, gentlemen. Please. Which made Chess hiss a bit, but only a bit; more for show than anything else, and not much for that, either. He rose, Charlie following like a too-long shadow, and stalked over, as the barkeep recoiled.
“Get a lot of trouble like last night in here?” Chess demanded, placing one fist on the countertop.
“Uh . . . somewhat, I s’pose.” Jaw wobbly as a turkey-neck, the man stole a squint at Charlie, adding: “Mainly when Mister Alarid’s about, truth to tell.”
“You do know how he ain’t the only bent creature in this world, though, right?” Chess asked. “Or me, neither?” As the man shifted even further back, visibly uncomfortable, Chess leaned in, confiding: “Hell, there’s even ladies like ladies, if you could credit it. Or them who take what’s given, without pledging any sort’a allegiance at all — all manner of strange creatures, roamin’ ’round out there in the dark! And any given one of ’em might sometime want a drink, a plate or to just set a while, without some drunken moron runnin’ their mouth.”
“Uh, I . . . don’t know nothin’ on any of that, Mister Pargeter. I just . . .”
“Run a bar, yeah. Need the custom, no matter who brings it. So I’m gonna make sure no fool like Sam Holger ruins your prospects on that score, ever again. Now, how’d that be?”
“. . . good, I guess . . .”
“All right, then. Stand back.”
Using one lit finger to carve wi
th, Chess doodled what looked like one of Songbird’s Chinee sigils on the wall behind, big enough to bake pies on. “This’ll be my eye when I’m gone,” he told the barkeep, hoping the idea sounded more likely than not. “What it sees, I see; show it something I don’t like, and I’ll be back. You probably don’t want that, I’m thinkin’.”
“No sir, Mister Pargeter.”
Emerging into the noonday sun, Chess turned to unhitch his horse, and found another animal tied up next to it: a stallion, black as Charlie Alarid’s hair and almost as stupidly big, already rigged out for hard travel.
“This’d be yours, I expect,” Chess said, as the kid stepped up behind him.
“Told you I was leavin’.”
“You did say something of the sort.” Chess swung up onto his own ride, popping the rope free with one hand, then shaking it to atoms with the other; he could call it back anytime he wanted, and it’d interfere with the reins. As Charlie mounted up as well, Chess touched the horse with a single spur, nudging it to turn, telling him: “Hope you don’t think travelling in the same direction means we’re together, as such.”
Charlie laughed, a music-touched sound, rhythmic as his own fretwork. “We’ll see. That thing you did in there, though — it actually work?”
“Hell, no; I ain’t got the sort of time to spend monitoring them that’s bound to hate our likes, let alone the inclination. Nice design, though, ain’t it?”
“It is.”
“Scary, too. That ought’a do somethin’, if only for a little while.”
“I somewhat think you were the scary part, Mister Pargeter. But Bud should recall the threat a good long time, if nothin’ else.”
They made good time back to that sign Chess had passed coming through, where Charlie reined in a moment, casting a side-eye back toward town — thinking on his folks, perhaps, and how he might not ever see them again. Time was, just the basic implication anyone could have kin they didn’t wish dead would’ve made Chess want to bash their stupid brains in, but not now. Another change.
Yet once again, Ed Morrow came into his mind; big Ed sweating beneath him on that first night at Splitfoot Joe’s, eyes gone wide and white as a half-broke horse’s, while Chess fisted their hands together and slid down his length with a holler, sure nothing on earth mattered as much but that too-happy place where the two of ’em would end up in just one — hump — more. ’Cause I don’t care to think on it no more, and you’re gonna get me so’s I can’t, without a shred of regard for the other party’s feelings. Like every other time he’d pulled that same trick on so many other men, none of whose faces he could even vaguely recall, let alone their names . . . all but Rook, and Ed.
Poor old Kees Hosteen, too, who’d cleft to him in the face of mocking indifference, only to die for his partiality just as surely as Chillicothe and his pals, or the Lieut, or that Pink Chess’d had his first gun off. Or all of Bewelcome township, for the grand sin of insulting Chess’s taste in bed-partners; all of Hoffstedt’s Hoard like-a-wise, excepting Yancey and Geyer, for the equal-grand sin of siding with Chess against Bewelcome’s own Sheriff Love, when that crusty gentleman came calling.
Sit there eyein’ me up like you never saw nothing prettier, Chess thought, his own gaze straying automatically back to Charlie’s own sizable form, wrapped in bad fashion though it might be. If you knew me at all beyond my fame, you wouldn’t want to come anywhere near, for fear of being pulled down like undertow. Or then again, maybe you still would; maybe you’d just come running the faster, dick in hand. ’Cause from what I’ve seen, you somewhat like things dangerous.
“That smile for me, Mister Pargeter?” Charlie called over; Chess hissed again, and shook his head. Incorrigible, that was the word he’d heard the Rev use, way back when — when he’d still thought Rook a good man to the core, an up-stood man-mountain set adrift ’mongst killers and rogues, with his thread-worn Bible quotes and his odd ideas about . . . everything, really. Before he’d finally found out better.
Only now did it occur to Chess, though, that there was probably always at least a shred of that man left in Asher Rook, deep down — had to’ve been, seeing what things came to, in their final throes. Same shred that’d dug itself inside Chess somewheres dark and set in to breed, eventually producing the person who’d kept on shocking himself with his own capacity for self-sacrifice. For that might be credited to Rook as well, along with Ed, and Yancey. And Chess himself, too, in the end.
Even me.
“Think a lot on yourself, don’t you, Mister Alarid?” Chess asked the man in question.
“Aw, why so formal? You could always call me Charlie. And me, I could call you — ”
“Gettin’ a bit ahead of the game, ain’t you?”
“You tell me.”
“Oh, I will,” Chess said, coolly. And turned his horse toward the sun, so the glare would block the fact that he couldn’t quite stop himself from smiling, yet again.
Hell really was murky, like the Bard had claimed; that was one funny thing, amongst so many. Though the fact that it resembled Asher Rook’s earliest dreams so little was also fairly amusing, for certain values of same: a dry, sere, awful place for all its deep darkness, like the inside of an oven never quite brought to full heat, and different from Mictlan-Xibalba’s clammy climes as lava was from dirt.
Not the same, and not a dream, either. Forever, too, or so the rumours claimed. He was prepared to believe it.
In the end, heat aside, Rook’s Hell had proven less the classic Baptist endless cook-kettle he’d always heard about than that Bead-rattler Saint Theresa’s vision of a place of absence where God turned His face away, weeping on sinners’ betrayal, and the sinners suffered thereby, as much as for any other reason. But being him, God’s face — one he’d never seen, any more than he’d heard His voice, no matter how much of His Word he’d back-spouted to his own venal ends — wasn’t the one which he found himself fixed on most.
All places bordered each other, down here. He felt them pluck at the edges of this private Inferno, begging pride of place. The Ball-Court, where Ixchel and her smoky brother lay coiled ’round each other, sunk back into torpor, plus a thousand thousand other places sown all ’round the globe, equally terror-wonderful. Where Anansi and Suu Pwa the Dust Devil, Crow and Rabbit and Sedna, Tiamat and Marduk, the Old Sow Who Eats her Farrow had devolved into an equally primal morass, along with pagan martyrs and Christian saints alike — Hypatia and Catherine, both of Alexandria; witches and possessees, witch-hunters and exorcists, workers dark or light, all trading in the same mythic substance. All of whom had begun as human, once upon a time; most of whom had been sacrificed to some idea of the divine and became divine in turn, at least temporarily. All of them, quite probably, hexes.
But who will worship at my shrine, Rook could only wonder, trapped here in his cell, now even Chess doesn’t think on me anymore? Who will remember I lived, let alone died — or how, or why? Who for? In service of what?
Now he had space to be truly honest with himself, Rook could finally admit he’d already figured how the real reason he could never preach effectively on a forgiving God was that on some level, he knew himself both unforgiven, and unforgivable. But one deity had loved him, at least, for a little while — and it was the mere idea of Chess being happy again, someday, which was occasionally enough to make him feel happiness’s twice-removed ghost, in return.
Rook remembered a fight, early on. How they’d looked at each other after, aching to grab hold and wrestle, to rip and tear ’til somebody was back on top and both of ’em were satisfied. ’Til Rook had finally said, with what he thought was fairly good imitation of cool insouciance: So here we are, Private — stuck together, one flesh, like any man and . . . man. Friends?
To which Chess took a deep breath, moving forward, ’til he was well within Rook’s reach. Staring up at him, hotly, as he said — We ain’t ever been friends, Ash Rook.
Would’ve been nice if he could’v
e had Chess kneel next to him as he died, if only to hold his hand, make it not hurt and watch as he went into that great night, submerged, a stone through dark fathoms. Hell, maybe to read to him from that Bible he’d given up in Ixchel’s service, which would’ve emptied itself out accordingly. Rook could almost see it now, leaning his forehead ’gainst the cook-hot wall, ’til it frankly hurt too much to do anymore. How the words would’ve floated up and disappeared into air, going out like sparks, leaving the pages bare.
But that wasn’t how it was to be, no. He’d seen to that himself.
Live a long time, Chess, he’d told him, once, when in his cups enough to grow maudlin. I don’t look to see you anymore ’fore I need to, if that. Repent, if you can —
Fuck that, fool; won’t get rid of me that easy, ’specially not if I catch you tryin’. You’ll see me again, no matter where you think you’re goin’.
Maybe. But — not soon, darlin’. Please.
Once a whenever, something he took for his turnkey came eddying in to hammer nails into all his softest places, then twist them; it was dreadful, formless, smelling of wet ash and covered in spikes, with too many mouths and not enough tongues to form much speech at all. In the beginning he’d railed at it, then begged it, then flattered it, then fallen silent. Now Rook asked it questions, hoping to trick it into contradicting itself. Could be its information wasn’t any better than his own, but the game did keep him thinking, if nothing else. Kept him dreaming, ensconced down here in the Devil’s shit-pit, with nothing to do but regret.
“Is Chess alive yet?”
No.
“Will I ever get out of here?”
No.
“Is there mercy, ever, even for such as I?”
No.
“Uh huh. So tell me this, Beelzebub — ain’t it true what I heard, that same as faithless preachers, all devils are liars?”
A long, long pause. Then, at last — with some reluctance —
. . . no.
So, yes. Yes to Chess still upright, burning back and forth across the wild world, bright and hot as any flame. Yes to repentance, to redemption, if only after long suffering — and now that he was forewarned, perhaps foolishly, he began to believe he might yet be able to take whatever else this place might have to dish out to him.
The Hexslinger Omnibus Page 107
