My room is little more than a box off the kitchen. Ralphie gets the good room, even though he doesn’t live at home any more. Ma and Pa, they have the room that should’ve been the back parlor, but they ran out of building material (and money) before our house got finished, so they improvised. The house is kinda truncated, which means that some parts look big and other parts that you’d expect got lopped off in the back.
For a while, Ralphie brought in real money, taking jobs as a hired gun, but now he mostly drinks the money away and never comes home. In fact, I had no idea where he was that morning that the wee folk showed up.
That’s all I could figure they were. In my reading, I’d seen stories about fairies, but not stories about subsets of fairies, like brownies or pixies, and I certainly didn’t know how they all worked together, like some little community, which they were. I also expected those communities to be very Old Country, which they aren’t, and thought that the stuff in the folklore was true, which it mostly isn’t.
Although some of it is, so figuring it all out was tough.
Meandering again. Sorry.
The farm is at the butt-end of nowhere in the middle of the Great State of California. My folks homesteaded, sorta, and thought they were land-rich, which they are, sorta, but they’re money-poor, and are destined to remain that way.
Our nearest neighbor is miles away, which is why, when someone whispered, “Hey, girlie,” at dawn, I let out one of those screams the dime novels call “bloodcurdling.”
“Hey!”
“Shush!”
“Shut up!”
Three different whispers. I sat up and didn’t see anything. At that moment, Ma stepped into my room, already dressed with her Saturday apron tied around her waist.
She looked around, saw me, saw that I was by myself, saw that I was white as a ghost, and said, “Another bad dream?”
I was shaking, my feather pillow shoved up between me and the headboard, my favorite quilt pulled up under my chin covering my night rail. The room looked empty to me too.
“I guess so,” I said, even though I never had a sound-only dream before.
She nodded like she expected that and to be fair, she was probably right. I had a lot of bad dreams, mostly about being trapped in mud or trapped in amber (from my reading) or being trapped in a mine or being trapped in the storm cellar. I woke up screaming from those too.
She said, “Your pa’s out milking the cows—”
Cow, I silently amended.
“—and I need some help with breakfast before you go shooting.”
My parents didn’t complain about my shooting. They encouraged it. Some weeks, it was the only thing that kept us in food. As I said, I’m good with a gun. Hell, I’m a crack shot if you really want to know, and I can fell a squirrel at 100 paces with one eye closed and the other half-covered with a patch. I’m not too fond of squirrel meat, but I’ll eat it when nothing else’s in the offing. And Pa, no matter how hard he tries, is probably the worst farmer on the face of the Earth. What he grows, nobody eats.
“All right,” I said, but Ma was gone before I could finish. I let go of the quilt and swung my bare feet out of bed. I always hesitate before putting my feet on the cold wood floor, and as I hesitated, I heard squealing.
Then something warm and soft landed on the big toe of my right foot. At almost the same moment, something else landed on the big toe of my left foot. And then something splatted against the floor.
I looked down to see what kind of creature— spider? mouse?—had landed on my foot. Clinging to my big toe was a little man, dressed in green, with a tiny feather jutting out of his tiny cap. He climbed up my toe, got past the nail, and chomped.
“Hey!” I said, shaking my foot.
There was another little man on my left foot. He was climbing the toe and I didn’t want to feel tiny needlelike teeth in my tender toe-flesh, so I shook that foot too. That didn’t dislodge the little guys (and at that point, I wasn’t questioning what I saw, I was just reacting), so I brought my right foot up, grabbed Little Guy #1 with my thumb and forefinger and picked him up by the scruff of his neck.
“Hey!” he said, sounding as upset as I had. Only his voice was little and squeaky and it would have made me giggle if it weren’t for the other little man heading toward the sensitive skin on the top of my toe.
I shook that foot so hard the little guy dislodged, did a flip as he went up in the air, two more little flips as he went down, and then he landed on the cold floor with a splat. ..
. . . next to a third little man, who had his feathered cap off, and was rubbing his beaked nose as if it hurt him.
“You bit me!” I said to Little Guy #1.
He grinned, revealing pointy teeth. “Yum;” he said. “Toe jam.”
Which made my stomach flip.
“Okay, first, toe jam is the stuff between the toes, and you didn’t get to that,” I said. “Second, that’s my toe jam and I didn’t give you permission to get near it or my toe.”
By this point, I had decided I was having a pretty wicked and realistic dream, and I have learned over the years when you’re having a wicked and realistic dream, you just go with it, no matter what.
His grin faded and he started kicking. The kicks gave him some momentum, and he started swinging. The fabric of his tiny shirt collar began slipping through my fingers.
“I’ll drop you too,” I said.
“Renn!” Ma shouted from the kitchen.
“Coming!” I shouted back. Then frowned. The timing of the dream felt off. Ma would’ve yelled like that when I was awake, but usually in my dreams, things happen consecutively, not all at the same time.
Little Guy #1 stopped kicking. Either I scared him when I yelled, Ma scared him when she yelled, or he didn’t want to get dropped.
I set him on the floor next to his buddies, and expected them to scamper off. Instead, they looked at me, including Little Guy #3 who was still rubbing the tip of his oversized nose.
“We came to talk to you,” Little Guy #2 said, as he stepped forward.
I tucked my bare feet under my thighs, then covered everything up with my night rail and the quilt.
“So talk,” I said.
“We came to see your brother, but we can’t find him. Is he here?”
“No,” I said.
“In that barn, then, with the ...” and here Little Guy #2 shuddered “... cow?”
“No,” I said. “He hasn’t been here in months.”
“Do you know where he is?” Little Guy #3 asked.
“No,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have chores.”
I leaned over the side of the bed, found my shoes, and slipped them on my feet. Then I grabbed my unmentionables, my socks, and my housedress and hurried off to the necessary. Even though I believed I was having a dream, I thought maybe it was one of those dreams where half of it was really happening (like Ma yelling) and half of it was in slumberland.
I figured that with my shoes and my dress on, the slumberland part would disappear.
I managed to get dressed in the necessary without touching any of my clothes to the unsavory parts of the two-seater, then scurried into my brother’s room, washed up with the pitcher of water and washbasin Ma always left for him in case he appeared in the middle of night, and then went into the kitchen.
Ma was nearly finished with her famous buttermilk pancakes—which are famous for a really good reason. I managed to get the table set before Pa showed up. He brought in some fresh warm milk. I scooped up a pitcherful, scraped the cream off the top, and we all said grace before tucking in.
I didn’t tell them about the little men, and my folks didn’t mention anything strange, so I figured I’d finally awakened all the way (and it was good to wake up to buttermilk pancakes).
I pumped and heated water for the dishes, cleaned the kitchen, and still managed to get to my own personal firing range by nine AM.
I practice every day whether I need to or not. Shooting is
90% practice; at least, that’s what I told Ralphie when we were training. Used to be, guns scared him. He hated the bang and the boom, he hated the way his gun kicked with each shot, and he hated the way that bullets destroyed whatever they went into.
I don’t know what changed his opinion. If his personal dime novelist is to be believed, it was when he saw his best friend all shot up by some sheriff. But I didn’t know Ralphie had a friend except me (no one who knows him really likes him much) and I’ve never been shot; besides, how would that make a man hire out his services as a gunslinger? It just never made sense, and Ralphie wouldn’t tell me when I asked.
So I spent my morning shooting tin cans and cow pies, hitting things at impossible angles from incredible distances, squinting and picking off leaves on trees as if they had offended me (both the leaves and the trees). I did all those things that would keep me in squirrel meat, and those things that just might get me a prize at the county fair, if they let me compete again, which they hadn’t for the past three years because I so soundly beat all the guys in the previous two years. (They let me back in the second time because they thought I cheated the first time and they planned to catch me. Nope. My shots, while impossible, were clearly legal—and clearly possible, Pa said, since I had done them, even if no one else could. That was when they banned me.)
I had gotten down to my last five bullets and debated whether I’d use them or whether I’d hang onto them, since using them meant spending my afternoon at the smithy begging for some lead. Old Gus had stopped making me bullets. He did, however, teach me how to cast my own.
I had my little case on a gigantic stump that I had flattened out to work as my shooting table. My hand fluttered over the bullets, indecisive, when someone cleared his little throat.
I froze, flashed on the dream, and thought, Naaaaw. I had heard a bird cough, nothing more.
“Missy!” said a squeaky little voice.
I closed my eyes, then opened them again. I was awake. Dammit. Then I looked around to see if anyone had seen me think that unladylike word (most of what I said and did was unladylike, but deep down, it bothered me more than I wanted to admit).
The three little guys were sitting on a tilting post from the collapsed fence that Pa hadn’t fixed in two years. He figured Ralphie would do it when Ralphie got home, but Ralphie didn’t do manual labor, and of course, didn’t bother to tell anyone. That collapsed fence was the reason we had “cow” and not “cows.”
“I don’t like it when figments of my imagination follow me around,” I said.
One of the little guys—I no longer had any idea if he was Little Guy #1 or Little Guy #2—giggled. Wee men shouldn’t giggle. It was infectious. Little Guy #3 (I recognized him from his nose) giggled as well, followed by the remaining little guy. And in spite of myself, I giggled too.
That was the moment I lost any control I might have had.
“We’re not figments of your imagination,” said Little Guy #3. He had a honking big voice, considering how tiny he was. The tip of his nose was red. Apparently, he had fallen on it when he was jumping for my delectable toes that morning and missed.
“We’re in need of help,” said Little Guy #2 (or the guy I was designating as Little Guy #2). I squinted at him, hoping to get a better look at him so I could better tell him apart from Little Guy #1—so that I wasn’t constantly changing their designation.
“We can’t find your brother,” said Little Guy #1.
“I don’t think anyone can,” I said.
They sighed. It sounded like the rattle of an errant summer breeze.
Little Guy #1 sat down and put his face in his hands. Little Guy #2 patted him on his tiny shoulder. Little Guy #3 stood at the very edge of the fence post, and looked like he would tumble off.
I moved closer, just so he didn’t have to lean.
“We have approached fifteen gunslingers,” Little Guy #3 said. “We are quite disappointed. They are nothing like advertised. Most drink to excess. Many did not believe we existed. Two called us rat babies and tried to stomp us out. Three shot at us and missed.”
He shook his little head as if he was more offended that they missed than he was that they had fired at the trio.
“None of them would listen to us. Your brother was our last hope.”
Then he sat down too and put his head in his hands.
“What do you need a gunslinger for?” I asked.
Little Guy #2 looked at me over Little Guy #1’s feather. “Three days hence, trolls shall invade our village. Their champion will face our champion. If their champion wins, they become our rulers. And if our champion wins, they will not bother us for another five hundred years.”
I frowned. “That doesn’t sound fair. Why don’t you get to rule them?’
“Have you met a troll?” Little Guy #3 put his hand to his exceedingly large nose. “They have terrible habits. They’re huge, and they all smell like rotted meat. Who would want to rule them?”
“Good point,” I said.
“In the past, we have always defeated them. They are not very bright. Our champion could always win, usually by felling the troll, and then biting him until he gave up in anguish.”
I could imagine. I didn’t like the feel of those razor-sharp teeth on my toes, let alone how it would feel everywhere.
“We have always sacrificed a champion for this, because troll flesh is toxic to us—not intoxicating like your lovely toe flesh.” At that moment, he bowed.
I did not thank him, although he clearly expected it.
“We have a champion chosen, but we cannot use him,” Little Guy #3 said. “One of our scouts learned that this year, the trolls were determined not to lose, so they hired an advisor. And the advisor told the trolls that we are allergic to metals. He advised the trolls to hire a gunslinger to shoot up our little town—”
(Here I was thinking the gunslinger could stomp their little town with his silver decorated boots, but I didn’t say anything about that.)
“—and not only would our champion be unable to fight, but we would also have to acquiesce to the troll leadership, because only they can remove metals and remain unharmed. Needless to say, we were terrified, until we realized we needed to counter their gunslinger with one of our own. But we cannot hire anyone.”
“If you can’t handle metals,” I said, “what would you hire them with?”
“Their heart’s desire,” the little guy said, and sat down. He sounded like he was going to sob.
“You would be able to grant them their heart’s desire?” I couldn’t quite believe what I had heard.
They nodded. In unison. I had never seen anyone do that before.
“If you have the kind of power to grant someone their heart’s desire,” I asked slowly, “why can’t you do that for yourselves?”
“Magic is soooo cruel,” said Little Guy #2.
I frowned so hard I could feel the skin on my forehead pulling downward. “You mean you can’t?”
They nodded in unison again.
“Well, why not have you—” and I pointed to Little Guy #3 “grant his—” and I pointed at Little Guy #1 “—heart’s desire?”
They looked at each other, and for a moment, I wondered if they had never thought of it. Then they shook their little heads.
“Magic is very, very cruel,” Little Guy #2 said. “It is not within the rules.”
“So break the rules,” I said.
“We break the rules and lose our magic,” said Little Guy #3.
Wow. That was clearly not a world I could survive in for very long. I would have broken a rule before breakfast.
I was still trying to process all of this. I had accepted that the little men existed. I had accepted that I could see and talk to them. I had also accepted that they were in some kind of crisis. But I was still trying to fathom how they had come upon this solution, and whether or not it was even feasible.
“Let me try to understand this,” I said. “You’ve been going around the West
, trying to hire famous gunslingers by offering them their heart’s desire.”
“Yes,” Little Guy #2 said.
I was shaking my head before I even realized I was doing it. “This isn’t going to work. Gunslingers are unimaginative men. If they had an imagination —” (and a brain, I mentally added) “—they wouldn’t use guns to solve every problem they come across. All they understand is shooting. I’m not even sure they have a heart to desire with.”
Westward Weird Page 16
