That was sixty years ago. Yoth keeps the glass of the case clear and the rifle oiled, but otherwise he leaves it alone. It’s loaded, unlike the rest of the pawnshop guns. It’s always been loaded. He took the bullets out once and held them, but he got a terrible feeling, and when he put them back in, there were burns on his palms. They took weeks to heal. That time he went to a doctor, who gave him some goat-shit-smelling ointment and told him not to play with matches.
At night he can hear singing coming from inside the rifle case, but he’s no fool. He’s not tempted.
Yoth’s four drinks into the dark when the Kid comes through the front door, slipping in without ringing the bell, loping over to the desk where Yoth is sitting. The Kid says, “Old man, give me your best shooter.”
“You’re not old enough to own a gun,” says Yoth. “I only sell to people old enough to aim.”
“I’m older than I look,” says the Kid. “And I’m not what you think. I want me some magic.”
Yoth eyes him.
“Mind out of here now, kid,” says Yoth. “I got the right to refuse service.”
Yoth Begail is eighty-six years old when the Kid steals the rifle off the wall of the pawn palace and shoots him dead.
The Hunter wakes with a start in the middle of a blizzard, her cave filled with gray light. She’s been sleeping a long time. Her hand is clenched around a slip of paper, and her mouth is dry.
Her heart starts up again, and she waits as blood circulates through her body, locks opening to let salmon through. Now the fish are running, red and pink and silver, bright fish in a bright river. Her horse is there in the entrance of the cave, his blue blanket over him, his mane whiter than it was when she was last awake. She shoves her boots on. The cave is lighter now, and icicles fall from the entrance, spearing the snow, cracking and groaning as they give themselves over to water again. Outside, flowers explode. The Hunter stretches her arms and checks her weapon. Her pawn ticket is still legible.
“Up, horse,” she says, and the horse stands and shakes himself. She straightens his blanket. “Up, monkey,” the Hunter says, and the monkey comes out of the saddlebag and looks around, eyes shining.
“It’s hunting season,” she says.
Another story from the history of the rifle: Yoth Begail fired this rifle just once, twenty years after he received it, into a stick-’em-up who’d opened the door of the pawnshop while Yoth was on the can. He grabbed the rifle without thinking, and pulled the trigger into the robber.
By then Yoth was forty years old and in love with the priest from down in the river valley, the one who traveled cabin to cabin spreading God like margarine.
Yoth had his own secrets, and his own once-a-year trip away from the woods to a city where there were bars to drink in and men to drink to, even if he had no way with words. Sometimes he opened his register and looked at the ticket and wondered if the Hunter was ever coming back. Yoth was starting not to sleep for thinking of the black-powder rifle, worrying that someone would steal it, and he wondered if what she’d told him was true, if it was the thing’s fault, or if that was just his mind running wild.
The priest—let us call him the Priest, in the tradition of this kind of story—came to the pawnshop one day in spring and knocked on the door. When Yoth opened it, he was startled. Man of God. There was no God out here. That was why he was in the woods. There was only the new reactor, fenced and barbed-wired, patrolled by trucks, and the old places, the missionary buildings going to crumble now, nobody worshipping in them anymore. Hunters holed up eating beef jerky in the wood churches these days, pine needles and pitch, rabbit bones splintered beneath the sign of the cross. Piss graffiti on the walls. Yoth himself had spent some time with a smoke-jumper in one of those shacks, before he stopped that sort of thing cold. Mob of neighbors at the pawn, that was what his kind of love led to, and he didn’t want it.
“Heard tell you were up here alone, Yoth Begail,” said the Priest, and smiled. He was a rangy man a little younger than Yoth, wearing a string tie and a black suit and holding a Bible in his hand. His face had an openness normally found in fools, but there it was, on him, a man with a clean shave, nicked jaw, and eyes that showed evidence of a history other than prayer.
“Am that,” said Yoth.
“Heard you might be looking for the Lord?”
“Heard wrong,” said Yoth, who could hardly speak. His throat had a lump big as a cocoon in it, and he had no idea what wanted to emerge. Words he’d never say. “You’re new out here,” he said instead.
“I came from Missouri,” the Priest said, with palpable awe. “On a train. I’m the new man of God out here.”
“You are that,” said Yoth. “Got a name?”
The Priest blushed from beneath his collar, his face heating to the color of a coal in a woodstove. Yoth felt himself blushing too, but he was in the shadow.
“I’m Weran Root. Not ‘the Priest.’ I don’t know why I said that. This is my first assignment. I’ve never been to a place like this before. It’s far between people. I’ve been walking this mountain since yesterday looking for you.”
Weran Root came in uninvited and sat down at the jewelry case, gazing in at twenty years of Sunday best. He picked up a red stone and held it to the light.
“What kind of gem is this?”
“It’s from when the reactor melted down,” Yoth tells him. “Twenty years ago. All over the news. You remember.”
Yoth could hear singing coming from the rifle. The jangling noise of a wedding in the wood, a charivari. Coins thrown into the apron of a bride, groom lifted and shaken upside down, laughter, fiddles and howls, whistles and shrieks of ecstasy. He tried to ignore it.
“What’s that on the radio?” Weran Root said. It was a Sunday, but there was nothing church in the song. He looked up at the case on the wall in wonder.
Yoth looked at Weran Root in similar wonder.
Everything was new.
Six months later, when Yoth was grabbing the rifle from the case in the dark, he heard the singing louder still, and as he fired, the singing reached a pitch of tambourine and cymbal, rattling bells, all that louder than the noise of the shot itself.
“Wait! I’m here to save you from the Devil!” cried the intruder, reaching for the barrel, but Yoth’s aim was true, and it was already over.
The smoke was dense and final, a black cloud in his eyes and lungs underlining each cell, a fog like a forest fire. It took a moment to clear, but by the time it did, Yoth already knew what he’d done.
He’d put a bullet in the heart of the thin man in the white shirt, string tie, and black suit, a bullet from a singing rifle pawned over by a hunter. On his back on the floor lay the love of one man’s life, his heart something unclaimable by ticket.
Out of the bullet casing came the singer Yoth had been listening to for twenty years, smoke like a roomful of pipes, and in the center of it—
Yoth fell on his knees as something, someone, expanded from out of the wound in the chest of Weran Root, toes still in the place where the bullet had entered, fingers stretching long and gleaming, body undulating up.
“Are you the Devil?” Yoth Begail whispered. “Am I the Devil?”
He was weeping, his hands full of bent wedding rings and crushed cash from the box, things to bribe back his beloved from the land of the dead.
You get one wish, the smoke said.
And so Yoth wished.
Forty years after Yoth Begail’s wish, the Kid drives down the highway. All he can think about is lack of love. He tells himself a story a night. Girls walking past him in the hallway of the high school. When he prays, he prays to the god of lost causes. He’s a lost cause himself, born bleak in a trailer out in the woods near the reactor, and his mama is a scavenger of skeletons. She smashes them up and makes craft glue mosaics out of them. He wishes she’d smashed and glued him into the shape of some other creature, but she didn’t. Now he’s this. It’s her fault. Their trailer is surrounded by fake white
wolves made of cement and paved in mosaics of glass and bone.
Everyone living left this area after the accident that didn’t happen, the fire that wasn’t. He and his mother stayed. Some people make peace with disaster, and his mother’s that kind. Maybe the Kid’s not, but he was doomed before he was born.
The Kid thinks fondly back on himself now, before innocence became experience, before he knew there’d never be any forever for him. He used to walk up and down the road, picking up souvenirs of crystal bones and holding all that hard blood in his hands, counting it up like he could build something out of it. He had visions of everything, back then. Now no one notices him.
Girls’ eyes slant away under lashes, electric-blue liner, and who’s that for? Their skin under tight jeans, and who’s that for? It must be for someone. Why not for him? Not for him, because it’s never gonna be him. The Kid’s got no future. He’s only past. There’s nothing for him but hands out in the parking lot of a gas station or in the urinal, head against the wall, looking for salvation in a hot air blower and any drug buyable from anyone who’ll sell to invisible boys.
Magic doesn’t make anyone love you. All the Kid can do is start a fire in the palm of his hand and that’s a trick he ordered from the back of a magazine.
Something offered him a wish after he fired that shot in the pawnshop. He’s thinking about it.
The forest is deep winter now, and the caves are full of sleep. Animals uncurl from corners, bears in the backs of mountains and bats in the tops of caverns. Out in the ice where the reactor was, there’s a hot, sulfurous spot, and beneath it there is a sound like coins in the pockets of the world. Steam rises from the cut into the frozen air, a cookpot. Out around that spot in the ice there are three black wolves, sitting on their haunches, their winter coats full and their bellies fat, unlike the other wolves in the area. These wolves are fed.
Wolves are only recently back out here, after years of ranchers and strychnine and years more of rumor. Wolves speak in howls, and when one is killed the rest know it and walk at night, grieving past the bodies on the fences, past the tufts of fur caught to the barbed wire. Now there are twelve wolves running over this mountain, living on deer meat and rabbit. They eat hot-blooded things, and an occasional bone, brought to them in payment. In the place where the reactor was, there’s heat and smoke, but the ice hides it.
The motorcycle the Hunter’s riding is gleaming black with white trim, a blue blanket stuffed in the gear bag. The monkey clings to her shoulder, its own little helmet buckled tight. There are rotting snowdrifts in the road, and fallen trees, and sometimes a dead animal starved and picked clean. A recently done deer looks reproachfully out from the roadside, flies hatching in her nostrils. The Hunter rides along this highway with its silver stripe down the center, her bag jingling as she goes.
When she gets to the pawnshop, it’s full dark, and there are no lights to say this is a palace. The spot sings out with heat, though, and she has no trouble finding it. It’s loud as a wedding in the woods, if it’s what you’re looking for. She dismounts and takes the monkey in with her, steps over the rubble and rank, the pool of blood, and finds Yoth Begail on the floor.
The monkey hops down, stands on the man’s forehead, and peers into his mouth. It knocks on Yoth Begail’s chest and his heart resumes beating, like an engine that’s got too cold.
“You’re not dead,” the Hunter tells Yoth Begail. “You just think you are. Where’d it go?”
“Who?” asks Yoth, bleary.
“The one who came out of the bullet,” the Hunter says. “I see you got shot. Did you shoot yourself, or did someone shoot you?”
“A kid shot me, and took the rifle when he went,” says Yoth.
“Did he make a wish?”
“I don’t know,” says Yoth. “Boy was a strange customer, and I was well and truly dead. I regret I didn’t see him coming.”
She goes. The bike growls, and leaves tracks like a man running barefoot, like a horse galloping in gypsum, and then the tracks are gone again, white hollows in an evening world.
Yoth turns his head to look at the vision beside him, a tall man in the string tie. All the gemstones that were in the case are on the man’s fingers, and all the music in the shop is played by his hands, and if he is not quite visible, if he lives in the crack between night and day, it’s no huge matter. The shop is as fine a place for shadows as anywhere.
Yoth’s wish was a switching of places, his dead beloved for the living djinn. He was left with a lover made of smoke.
“I thought I was over with,” Yoth Begail says.
“I thought so too,” says the man who was Weran Root. “But you’re not, and I’m not, and here we are, in the dark, without the devils.”
“The rifle’s with the Kid,” says Yoth.
“If I were still a praying man and not this, I might pray,” says Weran Root. “He’s going to shoot till he’s done. That’s his notion. It was written all over him. But we have a wish too. I planned for this. We don’t let boys bring down the universe.”
“We?” says Yoth Begail.
Weran Root opens his hand and reveals a bullet, the creature it contains still singing from inside it.
“I took this one years ago,” says Weran Root, with the peaceful Missouri certainty he’s always had, from long before he was a djinn. Weran Root never worried, even when love took him over and remade him. When he was changed from flesh into smoke, the love continued, blazing through Yoth Begail’s lonely life, making the entirety of it bright. Yoth looks at his husband and feels his own heart beating. He takes the Priest’s hand in his own.
“The legends lie. Wish-granters are not only makers of palaces full of beautiful girls and of forests in the desert,” Weran Root says. “Wish-granters sometimes reverse things.”
This is the beginning of this story.
Backward in time, a thousand years. Here’s a girl in the desert, enslaved to a sultan. She wanders in and out of the shadows of a roomful of oil lamps, stepping on a stool to reach the highest ones and bringing them all down at once for polishing.
She knows what they are. She knows what she is and is not supposed to do with these lamps. She doesn’t care.
She sets everything free at once. Why should they not be free? Why should she not? She frees herself from the job of story. She’s been the girl who tells tales nightly, the girl who memorizes the histories of every star and whispers them into the ears of the sultan in hopes of keeping herself from death. She frees herself from the job of guiding men through the dark.
Forward in time eight hundred years, that same girl, now a woman, walks the woods of this part of America. She runs into a trapper wearing a blue blanket stolen from his last wife’s people. He’s drunk, and he’s been traveling alone too long. He’s a man in a pile of pelts, bear and wolf, beaver and mink, all the heat of their fur divorced from their blood, and she has no use for him.
“I need a woman,” he shouts at her across the snow. “My woman died.”
“I don’t need a man,” she says, and keeps walking. Deep snow and snowshoes, leaving tracks like she’s two flat-tailed beavers walking side by side.
“You need me,” he insists, but she keeps walking.
He runs up behind her and grabs her by the hair, pulling the braid away from her skull, tearing the roots, and she feels her own blood sizzle on her cold skin.
That’s all he gets from her. Her heart is a copper lamp, and inside it is black smoke.
She made a wish a long time ago, and it was granted. She walks in safety.
The Hunter’s eyelids are marked with the trees from a smoke tower, the place she sees if she looks over the woods and watches how they turn to words written on white snow slates. Everything is written somewhere, and all the languages of the world are here, in the bird tracks and the wolves dragging bloodied rabbits.
She should have buried her captives when she needed to sleep, not pawned them, though the old rules said the pawn should have kept t
hem safe. She should’ve left them alone in the metal house in the woods, far from anyone, but last place like that, she found empty. A thousand years of searching for the wishes she set free, and now she only wants to find the last of them. They don’t stay caged in copper.
She wonders. Maybe the things she hunts, if she left them to their own devices, perhaps they’d carry the old to their beds and the dying to their graves. She’s been hunting too long to tell if the world is worse without wishes than with them. She’s seen some wishes made, though. She feels guilt for her part in history, and so she hunts the djinn, trying to bring them back into captivity.
The Hunter rides past the site where the expedition ate itself. There they were, their hands full of blood, their mouths full of bone. She rides past the reactor she didn’t keep from melting down. It wasn’t her fault. She was sleeping, and she didn’t know what was living inside it.
She’s behind a truck now, on the highway, her motorcycle whining, the monkey’s paws twisted in her hair. Rifle rack on the back of the cab, and the Kid’s driving on the wrong side of the road.
She can hear the radio, the Kid playing loud to drown out the noise as he heads toward the high school floodlights in the middle of the field, the peeled paint coming off trucks like onion skin, the smell of metallic sweat, sleep, and chemistry labs, the smell of the reactor’s effects continuing into the future, each generation on fire, brightness continuing through them, turning the children into something other than children. Now she knows that wishers are everywhere.
The Kid turns in at the high school. As he does, he looks to the thing in the back of the pickup truck and makes a wish.
There are reactions and reactors and spills in the river, there are trees growing up out of white dust and children born dazzled, with hearts full of black smoke. There are wishes inhaled in first breaths and exhaled in final ones.
The Kid has barred the door of the high school with an ax handle, and no one knows it yet. He is walking into the cafeteria, his denim making the rustle of rough animals brushing against one another in a pasture.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 39
