He touched the brim of his hat and his eyes fell. He lowered his head slightly to hide his own blushing. He had been face to face with demons of Hell. This was somehow worse.
“I’m sorry…please…I was just looking for a place to stay.”
“You blind, mister? You passed the goddamned hotel,” she muttered. “Why…”
And then she stopped. She stood poised, one small foot on the plank board in front of the No. 2. She came over and stood in front of him.
Miserably, he ventured to raise his head, and saw she was staring at him, looking him up and down, even as he had her.
“My God,” she said, and her face went from furrowed curiosity to a hint of hesitant pleasure, as if he were an old friend. “You’re Hasid?”
Her inflection, her pronunciation was unmistakable. He smiled slightly and nodded, amazed at the coincidence. She was Jewish.
Her own smile split her face. It lit up the night.
“Well! You’re not from around here. Where are you from?”
“San Francisco.”
Her cheeks swelled and she clutched her hands like a little girl in obvious enjoyment.
“I’m from San Francisco too. Near South Park.”
“My father was a dry goods clerk,” The Rider said. Strange, that he should tell a stranger all that. “We lived south of the Slot.”
She smirked.
“Oh, you caught me in a lie,” she admitted. “My father was a baker. We lived south of the Slot too.”
It was hardly a lie. South of the Slot was a working class neighborhood, surrounded by industry and immigrant slums. South Park was more affluent, and he’d known a lot of proud Jews who had claimed to live ‘near South Park.’ The two areas were close, after all.
“Well, you told me yourself,” The Rider smiled, “so it’s not a lie.”
“I’m Sadie.”
He faltered. He wanted to tell her his name, but he said;
“Rider.”
She cocked an eyebrow.
“What kind of name is Rider for a Hasid on foot?”
“Well,” he shrugged, “what sort of name is Sadie for a Jewish girl from south of the Slot?”
She giggled. It was absolutely musical.
“Alright, alright,” she said, warming to him. “What happened? They wouldn’t let you in at the hotel?” She didn’t let him answer. “Those bastards. Come inside.” She nodded to the No. 2. “It’s not very nice, but I know the owner, and there’s a cot you can sleep on in the back. Tie up your mule out front for now.”
He did, as she went inside, smiling fetchingly over her shoulder, oblivious to the lustful thoughts he conjured in his head.
The onager seemed to sense it, and threw back its head suddenly, catching him in the chin.
“Alright!” he hissed at the animal. “So you’re not a mule,” he whispered. “Well neither am I.”
He took his saddlebags and went in after her.
There was no door on the place, just a dusty muslin curtain that was drawn to the side. The floor was hard packed earth, the ceiling low and hung with straw. The bar was plank and barrel, candlelit. Behind it, a thin haired man with a large moustache in a nice, but rumpled shirt and pinstriped trousers stood pouring himself a glass of whiskey with an unsteady hand. There was a .44 lying on the bar beside the bottle.
“This all you brang in tonight?” he was saying as The Rider walked in. Sadie stood at the bar across from him. She laid a couple of coins on the wood. “You still just usin’ your hand? Didn’t I tell you you can’t make nothin’ just usin’ your hand?”
The man looked up at The Rider and fixed him with a pair of dark, bleary eyes. He scraped the money off the bar and tucked it into his pants pocket.
“We’re closin’ up,” he slurred. Then his eyes shot to Sadie and back. “‘Less you’re here for somethin’ quick, bud.”
The Rider felt his ears burn, and his fists balled at his sides. The money on the bar, his rough talk…
“Johnny, this is my cousin from San Francisco,” Sadie said quickly. “Rider, this is Johnny Behan.”
“Cousin?” said Behan, staring at The Rider and taking a moment to slam back his whiskey. “What the fuck does he want?”
“Just a place to sleep tonight,” Sadie said.
“What’s the matter, your cousin can’t talk for himself? Or does he only speak Heeb?”
“I speak English,” The Rider said, crossing the floor.
“What’s the matter with the hotel up the street?”
“They wouldn’t take him, Johnny,” Sadie said.
He shot her a look, then leaned on the bar and looked at The Rider.
“What makes you think I will?”
“Please Johnny?” Sadie said. “He’s got no place…”
“Alright, alright. He stays in the cot and he’s got to pay, same as everybody else.”
“He’s my cousin.”
“C’mon now, I ain’t sayin’ he’s got to do nothin,’ I’m just sayin’ that cot’s a place of business and no matter what he wants it for, I lose money if it’s occupied.”
“You’re drunk,” Sadie said, stepping away from the bar. She looked pleadingly at The Rider. “He wouldn’t talk this way if he weren’t drunk.”
Behan lunged across and caught her arm, pulling her back.
“Wouldn’t I?”
The Rider took a step forward.
“Let her go,” he said.
“You can keep your filial piety, cousin,” said Behan. “You just show me the color of your money or you can turn your Yid ass around and sleep out there with the pigs.”
The Rider’s thoughts went to the golden Volcanic pistol on his hip. He had dealt with men like Behan before. Sadie was right. He would not talk this way if he wasn’t drunk. The liquor hadn’t buoyed his courage, it had drowned his sense. He had an urge to lay the barrel of his gun alongside this pimp’s nose.
Then Sadie let out a shriek.
At first The Rider thought it was directed at him. Maybe she had seen his hand brush his pistol and thought he was going to gun her Johnny Behan down. He easily could have. The Rider doubted Behan was sober enough to get to the .44 and cock it.
But then he realized she had been startled by something else. Following her eyes, he turned toward the door.
There in the doorway leaned the haggard figure of a woman. She was dead pale and hollow eyed, her sandy hair soaked with sweat and clinging about her neck. Her grayish nightdress was plastered to her thin body. She clutched something wrapped in a black and orange afghan to her chest. Everything from below her waist to the ankles of her spindly, wobbling legs was bright red with blood. It was trickling down the insides of her knees in such copious amounts they could hear it puddling on the floor between her bare feet. Her face was screwed up into a trembling grimace, dark eyelids drooping, cheeks slashed with tears.
Sadie overcame her shock and rushed forward. The bloody woman staggered into the room, crashed against a chair, overturning it, and fell into Sadie’s arms.
“Oh my God.” Sadie sunk to the floor with the woman across her lap. “Oh my God, she’s dead!”
The Rider wasn’t looking at the woman. Her bundle had slipped from her arms as she collapsed, and its bloody little burden rolled out onto the dirt floor. It was an infant, or the beginnings of an infant, only a little less than nine or ten inches long. Gray and half-formed, it was curled like a salamander on the floor. The overpowering sea reek of it made The Rider touch the back of his hand to his lips.
“Good God almighty!” whispered Behan, making a cursory sign of the cross.
Protruding from the barely formed shoulder blades of the fetus were a pair of knobby protrusions, bent like spindly little elbows. The crooks of these growths were webbed with thin, fleshy membranes, like bloody, featherless wings.
* * * *
By the time Henry Wager the constable could be found, roused from sleep, and urged to put on his star and his boots, a crowd of noisy miners
had already gathered. Behan stood at the door and kept them at bay, while Sadie wrapped the dead woman in a blanket and The Rider stood at the bar considering the thing in the afghan.
Constable Wager was a squint eyed, rawboned desert dweller with graying hair and baked skin. He could have been thirty or sixty. He arrived at last in only his long underwear, boots, and coat, with his belt and holster over his shoulder, but no gun in it.
He knew the dead woman right off.
“Whalp,” he said over his shoulder as he stood over the body, idly scratching his behind, “somebody go wake up Alph Gersten and tell him his sister’s layin’ here in the No. 2 dead.”
To Sadie, he said;
“You find her?”
“She found us,” Sadie said. Her arms were caked in the dead woman’s drying blood.
Wager went over to the thing lying half covered in the afghan and exposed it with the toe of his boot.
His eyes widened and he took a step back at the sight of it.
“What the fuck is this?”
“She carried it in here,” Sadie said dully. She had covered it herself, and she came over and did it again, gently. “Getting it out of her is probably what killed her.”
“But what is it?” Wager pressed. “Some kinda…”
There was a commotion from the street, and a booming voice drew closer, calling out a name over and over again in a thick German accent.
“Rica? Rica? Where is she?”
Wager gestured hurriedly to Sadie.
“Come here and stand over it, girl, don’t let Alph see this damn thing.”
Sadie wrinkled her nose.
“Let him see it,” she said.
The man that appeared at the doorway was broad shouldered and red faced, with close cropped hair, huge ears, and a great, bushy moustache. Roused from his sleep like Wager, he had on only his trousers and braces, and great heaving muscles worked beneath the bushy hair that sprouted from his chest, belly and arms. He swept aside the miners and Behan and came into the room like thunder, calling his sister’s name over and over.
When he saw her lying on the floor at Sadie’s feet, he paused, then gave a great wail and fell to his knees beside her, lifting her easily in his arms. He commenced to shake her, as if to wake her, and called her name again.
Sadie came over and slapped him.
He stared up at her, his blue fire eyes gushing tears, and looked to Wager.
“What happened?” he managed.
“She did what you wanted,” Sadie answered coldly. “She got rid of it. It’s layin’ over there,” she said, pointing out the small form in the afghan. “Go on and look.”
Alph got to his feet and shook his head.
“I don’t want to see it.” He turned and went to the door.
Sadie took off her shoe and flung it. It bounced off the back of Alph’s head, hard enough to leave a red mark, but he didn’t stop. The men at the door stood aside and he bore the corpse of his sister out into the night.
Behan shot a disapproving look at Sadie, then his eyes went to the stillborn thing, and he called out after Alph.
“Well somebody better come and get this thing outta my place, goddammit!”
Wager scratched the back of his neck.
“Whalp,” he said. “I guess…I can take it.”
“I’ll bury it tomorrow,” Sadie said. “It’ll just wind up in a jar of whiskey at a penny-a-look otherwise.”
She wrapped the little body up in a tight bundle.
Behan came to stand by her.
“Say…,” Behan began.
“Good night, Johnny,” she hissed. She went into the backroom with the bundle and drew the ragged curtain shut.
Behan put his fists on his hips and called after her.
“Hey!”
The Rider dragged a chair from one of the tables across the floor and propped it against the wall beside the curtained doorway. He sat down and stared at Behan until the man broke into an uneasy grin and turned to the other men gathered in the doorway.
“Hey fellas, how about some drinks while you’re all clutterin’ up my front porch?”
As the men filed in, all talking at once, The Rider put his hat over his eyes and tilted the chair back.
He dreamed in red, as if through rock candy. All was the color of the lantern he had seen in the dark distance on the edge of Tip Top. In his dream it was night, the full moon scarlet in the sky.
He was naked and chasing a pale figure across a bed of stony, unending desert. The figure was a woman, one he had never seen before, or perhaps he had glimpsed once in the Jerusalem market. Her features were Palestinian. She had a long, prominent nose and bold eyes with a wide, full lipped mouth. There was an ecstatic smile on her face as she looked at him over her shoulder, a smile almost mad in its sheer abandon. She was naked too, and entirely hairless. She had no eyebrows, even. The red moonlight shone on her smooth head and on the curve of her ample posterior as she scampered lightly across the stones.
Although he was certain he had never seen her before, in the manner of dreams, she was Sadie.
His bodily excitement increased as his pursuit continued, and though the ground between them lessened, she never quite slowed, and so the distance was perpetual. She laughed, a high, titillating laugh, like clashing anklets, and shot him gleeful looks over her bare shoulder. It maddened him.
They passed through a grove of cactus, and the curved arms of the saguaros were suddenly alive with movement as dozens of perching birds took to the night sky. Their fluttering, speckled wings blotted out the moon.
Then he stood before a still, feminine figure entirely amorphous because of her long hair, which brushed the ground and was so full as to entirely obscure her body.
He felt ashamed by his nakedness and arousal. Then the figure before him sprouted slender, pale arms on either side, and lowered to the ground. From the mass of hair, a pair of shapely hips and well-formed legs appeared. She fell into a swaying, shaking dance that slowly built into a whirling frenzy. She turned graceful circles and wove mesmerizing patterns in the air with her twisting arms. He was aware of a tune, gentle and melancholy, almost courtly, and a beauteous voice whose operatic words he could not quite catch.
The Rider’s dream self turned in a dizzying circle and peered intently at the brazen form, desperate to catch a glimpse of her body and face. As her hair flew about her, he was rewarded with flashes of shuddering breasts, freckled shoulders, of a heaving belly and smiling, painted lips barely covering rows of straight white teeth.
He reached out to touch her and the dancing and singing abruptly ceased. She stood before him once more, frozen in a spraddle-legged, squatting pose, fingers interlaced above her head.
Then, from between her legs, through the curtain of hanging hair, a giant, shining black scorpion tail lashed out.
As the venomous stinger pierced his body, his chair slid out from under him and he crashed to the floor of the No. 2 with a fearful exclamation.
Behan peered over at him from the bar, as if he had never moved. Maybe he hadn’t.
“Whatever you had last night, I wish I could bottle it, cousin,” he said.
The Rider got to his feet and righted the chair. He was bathed in sweat and his body was still in a state of excitement brought on by the torridness of the dream. Pete Boggs would have laughed it off and told him to go behind a rock and take care of it. Pete would not have had an inkling of what The Rider knew. Dreams were not random mental associations for The Rider. He knew that the self sometimes slipped from its physical shell during sleep and that at such times, all manner of forces could assail it. Normally he took careful preventive measures including nightly prayers with the tefilin. But last night he had been so tired he had dozed off.
“Where’s Sadie?” he managed. His throat was dry. He nearly asked Behan for a whiskey.
“At the funeral,” Behan said.
The Rider went out the front door of the No. 2 with his saddlebags over his should
er into a cool and windy morning. A few men were hawking tools and supplies in the street, and he deflected an offer for the onager as he fed it. Then he headed off down the road, back to the cemetery he’d passed in the night.
There was a decent turnout. Alph Gersten was there, and Constable Wager. Some men bound for the mine and the mill had stopped to pay their respects. There were women there too, four of them, scattered among the mourners on the arms of their husbands. Nine more women stood at a respectful distance from the open grave, in various states of dress, ranging from stylish silks and bustles, to simple shifts of cotton and shabby homespun dresses. They were of every race, but shared a common, dull eyed expression, as if life were a thing to be weathered.
Sadie stood off alone. The Rider came up beside her as a balding man in a patched grey frock coat, who looked so much like the constable that The Rider’s eyes passed quickly between them both to reassure him they were not the same man, took out a Bible and began to read lowly over Rica Gersten’s simple coffin. His voice hardly carried above the wind and the churring of the birds, oddly enough, the same birds he had heard when he’d passed the graveyard last night.
Sadie looked at him, but said nothing.
The Rider’s eyes passed from the man in the frock to Alph Gersten, whose thunderous grief of the night before had burned down into a glowering resentment, which he directed solely at his sister’s coffin with glistening, heavy eyes. An older man with a graying red beard stood beside him, a straw hat pressed to his chest and a solemn, stocky woman with almost albino blonde hair and invisible eyebrows clutching his arm.
“The baby?” The Rider whispered.
Sadie looked at him again.
“I buried him with the other infants,” she said, and nodded to a row of small plank markers in the back of the cemetery, near a stand of brush.
“It was a boy?” The Rider asked.
She nodded.
“How many infants have died in this town?”
She shrugged.
“Count the graves…four.”
“The woman…Rica. Did you know her well?”
“Not well. I don’t know why she would’ve come to me. Last March a troop of soldiers stopped here for a couple days. She told her brother she intended to go off with one of ‘em. I guess she meant to follow the troop to their fort, work as a washerwoman so she could be close to him. Alph told her he wouldn’t have it, locked her in her room.”
Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter Page 20
