The Six-Gun Tarot

by R. S. Belcher

  Mutt shook his head. “I had a mother. I had a home here a long time ago. I have friends now and I have this badge. I’ve got plenty.”

  Coyote cocked his head, at a loss for words—a rarity. Finally, “Your loss,” he said. “You want to live like a dumb human, fine. You can die like one too.”

  They were both silent across the fire for a long time. The flames snapped and crackled, fighting against the wind.

  “Do you ever miss her?” Mutt finally said. “Do you even think about her at all?”

  “Not really, no,” Coyote said. “Don’t take that personal. It’s just the way I am, the way I have to be.”

  Coyote rose. Mutt smelled the dawn, distant but inevitable, moving toward them.

  “Time to move on,” Coyote said. “I’ve wasted enough time with you.”

  Mutt nodded. Coyote began to slowly pad away from the fire, into the brush. He looked back toward Mutt.

  “Last chance for some fun.”

  “No thanks,” Mutt said. “I don’t cotton much to your kind of fun.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Coyote said, and disappeared into the brush.

  “You can’t kill it,” the coyote’s voice called, diminishing. “It’s older than death. But you can hurt it, trap it. Remember that, boy! Things from the other worlds—things of spirit—it’s vulnerable to them. I think that boy in the desert, I think he has the Ulun’suti on him.

  “You’re still a damn fool!” The voice seemed to fold itself into the cold morning wind. “But what do you expect? You’re my son!”

  Mutt smiled, despite himself. The wind carried a distant coyote’s yip, yip yip, running ahead of the judgment of dawn.

  By noon, Mutt was headed for Golgotha, headed for home.

  The Ten of Wands

  Auggie hadn’t realized he was staring at Gillian Proctor until she met his gaze and smiled. He dropped his eyes and resumed wrestling with the small keg of molasses they were both hunched over. Auggie’s thick fingers fumbled with the tap while Gillian tried to hold the sealed wooden cask steady for him. Finally he stabbed the small metal pipe into the wood with a soft thunk.

  “You’re a kindness,” she said as he hefted the cask onto her kitchen table with a grunt. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his red, sweating face. “I couldn’t have gotten this all done in a week without your help, Auggie.”

  The shopkeeper shrugged and put the hankie away. “I did nothing. You are the cook, I’m just the pack mule for the ingredients, ja?”

  She laughed. It was a wonderful sound, Auggie thought. Here, in the kitchen of her boardinghouse, her hair falling down from her bun, a smudge of flour on her nose. She was lovely in the morning light. Her hand rested on his for just a moment on the tabletop. She looked into his brown eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  He was trying to find a way to dismiss this intimacy in as gruff a manner as possible, but he found he didn’t want to. He found a comfort in her eyes, her touch, that he had almost forgotten.

  There was a knock at the open kitchen door.

  “Oh, I hope I’m not disturbing anything!” Reverend Prine said, removing his hat.

  Prine was a fit whip of a man, dressed simply in black. The small amount of hair that circled his head was snow-white. His eyes were ice blue and his smile was open and honest. He was smiling now.

  “Reverend!” Gillian said, eyes wide. Both she and Auggie pulled their hands away and took a step away from each other. Auggie bumped into a chair.

  Prine chuckled. “Just came by to see how the spread for the social was coming along,” he said. “Looks like things are developing nicely.”

  “Ja,” Auggie stammered. “I was just getting back to the store. I have to … have to open. Ja.”

  “I hope you know how much the church appreciates your efforts, Augustus,” Prine said, entering the kitchen. “Not to mention Aaron Burke and his fiancée, Mary Toller, are just pleased as punch that they get to announce the date for the wedding there! It’s a big deal for them and for the whole town. Gillian has been telling us how much help you‘ve been to her in this undertaking. Feeding the better part of a hungry town is no small feat.”

  He offered a long, strong hand. Auggie clasped it and they shook.

  “I was just telling Gillian that she was doing all the hard work, I’m just making deliveries,” Auggie said.

  “Nonsense,” Prine said. “We’ve had so many people not show up for planning meetings this week and then Otis Haglund promised us all that meat and his butcher shop hasn’t been open for two days. If you hadn’t had those hams, we would have had a very bare table indeed, Augustus.”

  “I saw Dale and Margaret Hill’s store was closed today too,” Gillian said. “You think something is going around?”

  “I know Mr. Branchwell and Widow Marr have both been under the weather,” Prine said.

  “Still?” Gillian said. “I was meaning to go check on them, but I’ve been so busy this week. It’s very unchristian of me.”

  “You can only do so much,” Prine said. “I’ve tried to minister to several folk this week. No one is answering their door, it seems.”

  Prine chuckled nervously.

  Auggie realized how few people he had seen on the street this morning, how many shops were unaccustomedly closed. He had been so busy, so lost, in helping Gillian prepare that he hadn’t noticed. No, that was a lie. He hadn’t been lost in helping her; he had been lost in her. He’d been finding excuses to be with her, ignoring other things that needed to be attended to, in order to spend time with her. Another lie. Not “other things”—Gerta. He had been avoiding Gerta.

  “Well, “ Prine finally said. “I hope we have a good turnout for the social, despite whatever it is laying people up. I know we should. People have been looking forward to this for months now and everyone wants to see Aaron and Mary together. It will be fine.”

  “Maybe we should let Sheriff Highfather and Mayor Pratt know just how many people are out of sorts,” Gillian said.

  “I’ll let Jon know,” Prine said. “I’ll go by the jail tonight after I ride out to check on the Humbolts—they haven’t been in town for two days. Let’s leave poor old Harry be. He’s had an awful time since Holly went missing…”

  “… about two days ago,” Auggie said softly.

  A strange claustrophobia filled the room. The three stood silent, lost in tumbling thoughts.

  The streets were emptier today. Auggie drove the wagon back to the store. Not empty enough to be immediately noticeable, but familiar faces moving along familiar social orbits were missing. Mr. Dunn wasn’t sweeping the plank walk in front of his barbershop. That dandy Blackthorn wasn’t changing the marquee at Mephisto’s Playhouse and Showcase to announce what new production was replacing the three-week run of The King in Yellow.

  Something was wrong. The town seemed bigger, more sinister, colder. The feeling of tightness in his chest returned. Auggie tried to dismiss it and found he was thinking of Gillian. His fear was replaced with guilt.

  He turned into the narrow alley between Mephisto’s Playhouse and his shop, and brought the wagon to a stop behind his store. The back door was wide open. It had been locked.

  Auggie climbed off the buckboard and approached the door. The memory of old Earl, his gun pressed against Auggie’s chest, muscled its way to the front of Auggie’s mind. He picked up the axe that was leaning against a small woodpile and stepped into the interior gloom.

  The only light in the back room was from the open door and a small, narrow window. Dust motes drifted in the window’s beam, like stars floating through the cosmos. Auggie moved cautiously, his back to a wall. There was no one in the room he could see, but he edged along cautiously, made sure every box was a box, every table was a table. There was a loud thump overhead—from his and Gerta’s small home. It sounded like boots, tromping through his home, Gerta’s home.

  Gerta.

  The realization launched him into action. Auggie
smashed through the door in the storeroom that led to the small staircase. He strode up them, two at a time, axe in hand. He stepped into the dimly lit apartment, panting from his exertion and in fear of what he would find.

  Clay Turlough sat at the small kitchen table. Gerta was in front of him on the table, as were a variety of bottles and tools. Low moaning came through the tank’s speaker. The liquid within was very dark.

  “What the hell do you think you are…?” Auggie rumbled, angry and relieved at the same time.

  Clay stood; his face was a mask of rage in the pale, greenish glow of the tank lights. “I’m trying to help her,” he spit, crossing the room to face the burly shopkeeper. “She’s sick, real sick! You haven’t been doing any of the things I told you to do! You haven’t been skimming the tank, you haven’t been replacing the old formula with the new and it’s damn obvious to everyone in town you haven’t been talking to her enough!”

  “You leave Gillian out of this! I was only—”

  Another moan from the speaker. Auggie let the axe slip from his hands to the floor. He walked slowly toward the tank.

  “Gerta?”

  The eyes fluttered open. One of the lids was starting to come loose at the edge and wavered a little bit in the glowing green water.

  “Auggggguuuuuustus?” she replied, like waking from a painful fever dream. “How long? It hassssssss been ssssssso long.”

  He leaned over his wife, the hot tears building behind his eyes. He fought to hold them at bay. He had no right to weep. Clay stood at his shoulder.

  “I know it has. I am so sorry, Gerta. I was … preoccupied, but that is over with now, my love. I am here for you.”

  Gertie did something neither man could recall her doing since her living days. She smiled, as best she could. It cost her more tearing of the eyelid and some of the skin on her cheeks.

  “It is all right, my darling. I know I have been sick for a long time and I don’t want you to be stuck here at my side all day long. It is fine, yes?”

  Clay Turlough understood human physiology better than any other man in this town. He knew the mechanics of the human form intimately, and yet he was at a loss to explain why his throat was tightening, his eyes dampening, as he listened.

  “Is the weather good, my love? Are the flowers blooming off the desert?”

  “Ja … yes, they are very beautiful. Very beautiful.”

  “That is good,” she muttered, and smiled again. Already her eyes were closing. Clockwork ticking following each motion, the hum of tight springs. “Would you ask Gillian to pick me some for my bedside table? I miss the flowers very much.”

  Tears fell down Auggie’s cheek, hot and insistent, like the pain in his soul had turned molten and had nowhere to go but out, out into the world. They made tiny silver ripples on the surface of the tank’s dark liquid.

  “I will get them for you, love,” he croaked.

  “I’mmmmm sorry, Augustus,” she said, the distortion beginning to muffle her words. “I’m sorry I have been sick so long.”

  “Hush, darling. Rest now; please just rest.” His shoulder heaved silently.

  The tears struck the liquid: pat, pat, pat.

  “Ssssssssomeone was singing to me,” she said, dreamily. “Was it you, Augustus?”

  “It was me, Gertie,” Clay said.

  “Oh, Clayton. It wasssssss very beauuuuuuutiful. I had almost forgotten music. Please, ssssssssing to me some more.”

  Clay slid past Auggie. Two pairs of red, wet eyes glared at each other in accusation, sadness and camaraderie.

  “Okay, Gertie, let me sing you a dittie,” Clay said, wiping his eyes and sniffing.

  Auggie plodded into the living room. He made his way down the stairs to the sounds of Clay’s singing.

  The Two of Wands

  The third shift never came out of the mine.

  The mine manager, Easton, ordered word to be sent to Deerfield and Moore that there might be trouble. Easton then went down, personally, with the men of the morning shift, leading the way into the maw of the mine with a pair of canaries in a cage on a long pole.

  Morning ground away into mid-day and there was no word from either shift.

  Deerfield and Moore arrived from their hotels around one. A senior miner named Kelly met them near the entrance to the mining camp.

  “When Easton went in, he told me to take charge if there was any trouble,” Kelly said. “It’s past time for first shift to be up and second to go down. What do you good sirs want us to do?”

  “Where is Mr. Phillips?” Deerfield asked, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

  “Well, sir, that part is very queer. A few of the fellas on guard detail said that Phillips and Reverend Ambrose showed up here last night when second shift was getting off. They say that Phillips ordered all the remaining blasting materials loaded onto rail carts and taken into the mine. He said you had authorized some additional blasting.”

  “We did no such thing!” Moore said, looking at Deerfield.

  “No, we didn’t,” Deerfield said. “The reverend and Phillips went down with the third shift?”

  “Yessir.”

  Deerfield sighed. They had contacted Ambrose after the incident with Bick last night and had received a most cryptic response from Ambrose’s man, Phillips, by letter waiting for them this morning at their hotel.

  The Reverend says that Mr. Bick will be dealt with—have faith and rejoice for the day of blessed rest is at hand, the note announced in Phillips’s small, neat utterance.

  Phillips was a mystery to Deerfield. The man was large, powerfully built, and obviously had a constitution of steel to deal with explosives as temperamental as dynamite. Ambrose had mentioned once that Phillips had fought in the war and lost his family to it. The huge, imposing figure was seldom far from the reverend’s side and Ambrose often called him his deacon. There was something about Phillips that had always sat very unwell with Deerfield—an impression, nothing more. Back home, Deerfield owned a cat, a black Persian. It was a magnificent creature and it often seemed to suddenly stare off into space, as if it were regarding something Deerfield could not see. Phillips had the same look.

  “Very well. Damn it all to Hell! Mr. Kelly, round up the remaining men. Equip them and prepare to go below. We shall be accompanying you.”

  “Yessir.”

  Moore looked at Deerfield with a look normally reserved for deer on the wrong side of a gun.

  “Oscar, are you sure that is the best policy?” Moore said. “I mean, these mines are terribly unstable, not to mention filthy. And I am terribly susceptible to the chill. Let’s let the men go down: It’s what they do; it’s what we pay them for.”

  Deerfield was already inspecting a hooded lantern. He placed it on a crate and pulled a small pocket derringer from his waistcoat.

  “I am tired of whatever game it is Ambrose and his man have gotten us into, Jacob. Bick is deadly serious about his threats and I am becoming more and more convinced we have been used by Ambrose.”

  Deerfield snapped open the breech of the small gun. Satisfied that it was loaded and ready, he closed it with a metallic click, and put it away.

  “I am tired of this. I’m tired of feeling manipulated by Ambrose, by Bick. I’m going to get some answers. Go or stay, Jacob, I’m tired of your cowardice and, honestly, to blazes with you.”

  Deerfield picked up the lantern and moved to the front of the gathering crowd of miners. Many of the men were carrying rifles as well as picks. A few clutched Bibles and crucifixes. They all looked tense and frightened.

  Moore rubbed his face and looked at the ground. His shadow was growing longer, bleeding into the darkening ground. He sighed and prepared a lantern of his own before he shuffled up to his appointed place a few steps behind and to the right of Deerfield.

  “Men!” Deerfield shouted to the assembled miners. “Stay calm and keep your ears open and your eyes peeled down there. With that dynamite and any gas pockets down there, there’s no shooting
unless I order it. Some damned fool starts popping off his gun and he could bring the whole place down on us … and if he doesn’t kill us, I’ll kill him myself.”

  Kelly made his way to the mouth of the mine. He held a canary cage on a long pole. The bird chirped and fluttered about.

  “Very good, Mr. Kelly,” Deerfield said. “Let’s go.”

  The descent was made in silence. There was an occasional cough, sniff or whisper. But the men were focused on every shadow, every sound, not that there were many. This deep under were absolutes of darkness and stillness. Douse your lantern, stop walking, slow your breathing and you’d find yourself enveloped, absorbed by them.

  No sound—especially the comforting murmur of nature most people ignore consciously but that constantly reminds them they are connected to life, to a living world. No light—not even the tiniest moon-sliver shimmer of illumination for the starving eye to grasp at. Void. This far below the earth, the only reminders a man carried that such a verdant place even existed were whatever he carried in the bone vault of his mind.

  The party reached the slopes for the third level, near where Phillips had blasted earlier in the week. The wooden horses, cordoning off the new vein, lay in the dust. The support timbers for the entrance were jammed crookedly into the living rock, giving the maw the impression of a snag-toothed, leering grin.

  “Stop,” Deerfield said. There was something on the floor along with the discarded barriers. He knelt down while Moore aimed his lantern’s beam at the ground.

  It was a canary, the tiny form twisted and stiff, its dark eyes wide and vapid in death. One of the miners muttered an oath; another, a prayer.

  “This way,” Deerfield said. “It didn’t die from gas, I’d wager. They came this way. So do we.”

  The new tunnels were narrow and jagged. A man had to move through most of them sideways, with an arm thrust out in front of him holding his lantern. The heavy, silent air reeked of dust, lamp oil and blasting powder.

  Deerfield heard Moore’s coughing and panting behind him; the noise bounced off the tight passages. Jacob really wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing. Deerfield was about to call back to his partner and tell him to head back up when one of the men near the front shouted out. The message made its way along the human telegraph line quickly.