The Six-Gun Tarot

by R. S. Belcher

  Billy grunted, and pulled himself to his feet. “A while later, the war was over and I got to come home. I never saw the Chinaman again. The end.”

  “Let me see it, Pa!” Lottie said eagerly, practically humming with anticipation. “Please!”

  Billy smiled and nodded. He lifted the plain black eye patch that covered his left socket. Lottie laughed and clapped. Jim crowded forward too to get a better glimpse of the seldom-seen artifact.

  “It’s like you got a green-colored eye,” Lottie said softly. “It’s so pretty, Pa.”

  “That green color in it, that’s jade,” Billy said. “Lots of jade in China.”

  “Tea too,” Jim added.

  Lottie stuck out her tongue at him. “You’re just trying to be all highfalutin and smart seeming,” she said.

  “All right, you two, that’s enough,” Billy said, lowering the patch. “Let’s get back to work, Jim. Lottie, you run on home to your momma, y’hear?”

  Jim watched Lottie dance through the tall, dry grass, empty pail in her small hand, the sun glistening off her golden curls. She was singing a made-up song about China and jade. She pronounced “jade” “jay.”

  Jim glanced to his father, and he could tell that one of the headaches was coming on him hard. But he was smiling through it, watching Lottie too. He turned to regard his thirteen-year-old son with a look that made the sun shine inside the boy’s chest.

  “Let’s get back to it, Son.”

  He awoke, and it was the desert again. The green and the mountain breeze were gone. The sun was coiled in the east, ready to rise up into the air and strike. It was still cool, but not cold anymore. He remembered the coyote and spun around, gun in hand. Everything was still and unchanged in the gathering light.

  Promise’s breathing was labored and soft. The sound of it scared Jim, bad. He tried to get her to rise, but the horse shuddered and refused to stir.

  “Come on, girl, we got to get moving, ’fore that sun gets any higher.”

  Promise tried to rise, coaxed by the sound of his voice. She failed. He looked at her on the ground, her dark eyes filled with pain, and fear, and then looked to the gun in his hand.

  “I’m sorry I brought you out here, girl. I’m so sorry.”

  He raised Pa’s pistol, cocked it and aimed it at the mare’s skull.

  “I’m sorry.” His finger tightened on the trigger. His hands shook. They hadn’t done that when he shot Charlie. Charlie had deserved it; Promise didn’t.

  He eased the hammer down and dropped the gun into the dust. He stood there for a long time. His shadow lengthened.

  “We’re both getting out of here, girl,” he said, finally.

  Jim rummaged through the saddlebags and removed his canteen. He took a final, all-too-brief, sip of the last of the water, and then poured the rest onto Promise’s mouth and over her swollen tongue. The horse eagerly struggled to take the water in. After a few moments, she rose to her feet, shakily.

  Jim stroked her mane. “Good girl, good girl. We’ll make it together, or not at all. Come on.” They began to trudge, once again, toward Golgotha.

  The Moon

  The darkness filled with a terrible pressure behind his eyes. The pain was thick and settled over his skull like lead syrup. Jim opened his eyes and knives of sunlight stabbed into them. A groan escaped his cracked lips.

  “It’s all right,” a voice said over the clatter of wagon wheels. “We got you, young fella. You’re going to be right as rain.”

  Jim felt cool, spidery hands slide under his back and prop him up. He was under a wool horse blanket. It was scratchy against his red skin, but its shade was keeping the blazing sun off his head. A pale, cadaverous hand held a canteen before his mouth. There was a sour odor coming off the hand and for a moment he thought he was being ministered to by one of the dead pilgrims lost to the 40-Mile.

  “Drink,” the voice said, and he did, in greedy, silvery, cold gulps.

  “Not too fast,” a second voice said. “You’ll get sick.”

  Jim’s vision was blurry and his eyes felt sticky. He turned his head enough to see the man who was holding the canteen. His face was thin; his sparse gray hair was swept back from his high forehead. His features reminded Jim of a vulture. He looked concerned for the boy’s condition, but he also seemed kind of fascinated by it too. Lottie had once looked at an ant she trapped under a Mason jar the same way.

  “How is he?” the driver asked.

  “Sick,” the vulture-man said. “He’s redder than a preacher in a whorehouse.”

  “Promise,” Jim croaked. “My horse, is she okay?”

  The cold hands turned Jim’s head toward the back of the wagon. Promise was shuffling behind the moving wagon, her reins looped around the stakes that ran along the sides of the wagon. She looked tired, but she was moving and she snorted when she saw Jim.

  The boy managed a weak smile. “See, girl, I told you we would—”

  He fell into buzzing darkness again.

  It was a hot July evening. The lightning bugs were drifting across the front acre like sparks from a bonfire. Jim was sitting out on the porch of the homestead, trying to find Sagittarius in the night sky. Lottie was already asleep in the loft, but Jim was allowed to stay up later to play fiddle with Pa on the front porch. Momma would sing as the lightning bugs danced.

  But tonight there wasn’t going to be any singing or playing. Jim could hear Ma and Pa fussing, inside the house, their voices gaining in speed and volume.

  “Hush up now, William; the children will hear,” Momma said.

  “Hell with ’em!” Pa bellowed. “Maybe they’d like to hear what a man’s gotta put up with just to have something to soothe his burning head.”

  “You’re drunk,” she hissed. “Please, William, if it’s the headaches, we can go see Doc Winslow—”

  “Doc Winslow can go straight to Hell, too!” Pa roared. “He ain’t got nothing in his little bag that’s gonna stop a Johnnyman’s curse. This damn eye … like ants made outta ice crawling in my skull.”

  “Let me help you, darling, please.”

  There were loud crashing sounds—pots and chairs knocked about, Momma crying out in terror. Pa threw open the door and staggered out into the warm, sticky night. He froze when he saw Jim standing there wide-eyed and silent.

  “Pa,” Jim said. “Momma all right in there?”

  Billy Negrey nodded slowly. Inside, Lottie was crying and Momma was calling out to her.

  “Jim, you know I love your mother, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jim said.

  “Sometimes this, this thing … in my head. I say things, I drink, ’cause it hurts so damn bad.”

  “I know, Pa. Ma knows too. She knows.”

  Billy staggered off the porch and toward the barn. He turned to regard his son. Billy’s skin was dream-spun silver in the bright moonlight. The eye patch was hidden in shadow. Jim was taken by how old he looked—not the years but the awful toll this life had exacted on him. His God-given eye fixed on Jim’s own.

  “Take care of your mother and Lottie, Jim,” he said. “I’m going into town.”

  A few minutes later he rode out of the barn on his horse and disappeared down the dirt road toward Albright. After a time, Lottie stopped crying. A little while after that, Jim heard the porch door close behind him and felt Momma’s small, strong hands rest on his shoulders.

  “It’s all right, Jim,” she said softly. “Your poor father just needs to find himself some peace, that’s all.”

  She wrapped her arms around him and began to sing “Barb’ra Allen,” her favorite song, low and sweet. It was old, like the mountains it came from, another place, another time. It was sad, but there was a beauty in the sadness that Jim didn’t fully understand but that soothed him nevertheless; it was Momma’s song. He picked up the fiddle and played it the way Pa had taught him.

  The stars blazed and the lightning bugs drifted. The moon painted the world in smoky silver and endless ink. He
felt her love, for him, for Pa, and all was right in the world then. It was all going to be just fine.

  He never saw his father alive again.

  Jim opened his eyes to a vast canopy of black velvet, sprinkled with silvery sand. He was on his back looking up. It was cold—a deep desert night. He struggled to sit up and blinked. He was under the warm horse blanket beside a crackling cook fire. About twenty yards to his left was the wagon he had been in earlier. To his right he could see Promise tethered to an emaciated excuse for a tree beside a pair of short paint horses. The mare seemed stronger, more alive than he had seen her since they had entered the arid hell of the 40-Mile Desert.

  “She’s a good horse,” a man’s voice said from across the fire. “Strong heart, strong spirit.”

  The man leaned closer toward the flames and Jim could make out his features in the frantic, shuddering firelight.

  He was Indian, the first real one Jim had ever seen. His hair fell down to his shoulders in black, oily strands. His nose was crooked and seemed too thin and too pointy. His eyes reflected the firelight like spit on slate. His face was a grizzled topography of pockmarks and scars that made it hard to figure his age. His eyebrows grew together, colliding over the crook of his nose. He smirked when he saw the reaction his appearance created in the boy. The gesture revealed a mouthful of yellowed, snagged teeth and two very sharp, very straight incisors. The image triggered a memory in Jim that darted in his groggy brain, like fish in a pond, and then was gone.

  “We’re keeping the horses over there so they can stay upwind of me,” the Indian said. “Horses don’t like me.”

  “I thought horses liked Indians,” Jim muttered.

  “Well, they don’t care much for me,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Jim said, “for saving us. I’m obliged.”

  The Indian shrugged and stood. He was short and thin, but there was a languid strength in him. Jim noticed the six-gun strapped to his left thigh and the huge hunting knife tied to his right.

  “Mutt,” the Indian said, handing the boy a plate of cold beans and hunk of gray bread.

  “Jim,” the boy managed to get out before his face dived into the plate. Mutt chuckled; it was a dry sound like sandstone underfoot.

  “Figured you’d be hungry,” Mutt said. “How long you out there alone, Jim?”

  “I kind of lost count. Days, I reckon. Promise, she got hurt on the … second day? That slowed us down a bit. We were trying to make it to Virginia City. I was looking for work.”

  “On the railroad?”

  “M’hm,” Jim murmured around a mouthful of beans and bread.

  “Slow up there,” Mutt said, handing him a metal cup full of water. “Your belly’s ’bout the size of a hooter right now—you eat all that too quick, you’ll end up sicker’n a dog.”

  Jim wiped his mouth on his sleeve and took a deep swallow of the water.

  “How old are you, boy?’

  “Turned fifteen, last October.”

  “Where you from?”

  Jim froze up a little. He tried to be as blasé as he normally was when it came to lying about his past, but it wasn’t easy when you were tired and sunburnt and groggy, and it seemed awful disrespectful to lie to the man who saved your life.

  “Kansas,” he said after a beat.

  Mutt looked at him for about the same amount of time, then nodded. “Kansas it is then. Well, you didn’t make it to Virginia City, but I’m sure you can scare up some work in Golgotha.”

  “That where you from?”

  The Indian nodded. “Presently.”

  “I thought there was another fella with you,” Jim said. “I woke up and he was leaning over me, I think he gave me water.”

  “Yup. That’s Clay. It’s his wagon.”

  Mutt jerked his thumb in the direction of the buckboard.

  “He’s asleep up in it. Afraid of waking up with the snakes.”

  “Well, we sure were lucky you-all were passing through.”

  Mutt frowned and refilled Jim’s cup from a canteen. “We weren’t exactly passing through, Jim. You’ve got some medicine about you.”

  Jim laughed. It hurt, so he stopped as soon as he could. “Shoot, I ain’t no doctor. I’d feel sorry for anyone who I tried to fix up.”

  “No, I’m talking about the old medicine, the first powers. The things that move like crazy smoke and fever dream through the worlds. White men call it magic—a little word to hide all the world’s truth behind. White men like to try to laugh at the things that scare the hell out of them. So, do you know any magic, Jim?”

  Jim paused. He remembered what happened in the graveyard outside Albright—the unmarked grave and the eye. If he told anyone, even this crazy-sounding Indian, they would surely think he was insane. He shook his head and looked into the fire.

  “No sir. I ain’t no wisdom, if that’s what you mean. I’m a God-fearing servant of Christ, and I don’t truck with no haints or boogeymen, or none of that, no sir. Devil’s business, it is.”

  “Uh-huh,” Mutt said, but the yellowed grin was back. “Right. So why do you smell of power, power that I could track across the desert?”

  “I … I don’t understand. You were out here looking for us?”

  “I came across you out here the other night. I didn’t want to frighten you, so I went back to town and talked Clay into bringing his wagon out here to fetch you and Promise.”

  Jim felt his memory grope around to fill in some detail, some impression that what Mutt was saying was solid. There was nothing. Had he been so tired he hadn’t seen or heard the Indian? Or was Mutt like the Indians in the dime novels he read, the ones with the orange covers and the stories of the wilderness? Those Indians were invisible, like smoke, or haints.

  “I rightly don’t know,” Jim said, covering the pocket of his pants with his hand. “I ain’t got no power, Mutt. If I did, you think I’d be stuck out here?”

  “Your folks know you out here?”

  “Not much work back home,” Jim said, the lie sliding smoothly from his lips this time; he had plenty of practice telling this one and he had his footing about him again. “I told Ma and Pa I’d come out here and get a good-paying railroad job, send some money home.”

  “Back to Kansas, right?”

  “Yup.”

  The cold air around them suddenly filled with howls and yips. Mutt stood again and his hand fell to his gun.

  “Coyotes?” Jim said as he moved closer to the fire.

  Mutt nodded. “They can see it too,” he said.

  “What?”

  There was movement in darkness, a swarm of dark motes hurtling forward across the plain toward the fire. Separating, accelerating. Hot breath, bloody eyes.

  “Whatever that power is you don’t have,” he said as he pulled a burning branch out of the fire.

  Jim rose, shakily, and grabbed a torch as well. He dug into his pant pocket frantically. “Is this it?” he said, and held up his father’s jade eye.

  A snarling furry shape lunged out of the darkness toward Jim’s hand. Mutt was suddenly there; his firebrand smashed into the coyote’s flank with a whoosh and a wild shower of sparks. The animal yelped and crashed to the ground. It scampered to its feet and disappeared into the darkness. Another member of the pack snapped at Mutt’s vulnerable side, but Jim was there with his own torch. The animal howled in pain and retreated. The boy and the Indian stood back-to-back as the night encircled them and showed its sharp teeth.

  “There’s got to be a dozen of them,” Jim said between ragged, frightened breaths.

  Mutt grunted and brandished the torch. “Sorry to say, I’ve got a big family.”

  “What?”

  “They’re my kin.”

  “Your kin?”

  “My dad sent them,” Mutt said. “He loves shiny things. No chance you want to give that up, is there?”

  “It was my pa’s,” Jim said. “I’m not giving it up to a bunch of smelly curs … no offense.”

  “No
ne taken. They’re the bad side of the family, and they really do smell.”

  A gravel-edged growl called out from the darkness. A large, grizzled coyote padded into the circle of firelight. Its one good eye glared at the Indian.

  “Squint,” Mutt said. “Didn’t know you were still prowling around doing Dad’s dirty work for him. Still haven’t learned you can’t suck up to the old man, eh?”

  Squint snarled and froth exploded from his mouth. In the firelight’s trembling shadows Jim swore the animal looked like the Devil himself.

  “Can’t do that, Squint,” Mutt said to the animal as he slid the knife free of its sheath. “It’s the boy’s birthright. Wouldn’t be proper to steal it. Besides, now that I know it’s you Dad sent out, I just want to mess with you.”

  He grinned and showed the coyote his crooked teeth as he crouched close to the earth, ready to strike. Squint growled out a command to the others and they began to howl. The one-eyed coyote hunched, ready to pounce.

  “What do think they’ll call you when you ain’t got no eyes left?” Mutt whispered.