The Six Messiahs

by Mark Frost

  We got an empty belly and an itch we can't scratch.

  He watched her with fanatical concentration; Dante liked the way her haunches rolled when she walked, the way her strong brown hand gripped the handle of the suitcase. He might be half-blind, but he could still spot an Indian a mile away.

  When would these women learn they just shouldn't travel alone? Chicago was a rough town; a lady's luck could turn bad any moment, thought Dante, and here she was tempting fate, walking around near the station after dark. As if she ain't asking for trouble, strutting her stuff so shameless, trying to pass for white. Immoral is what it was.

  What this squaw needed was to be taught a lesson, and

  Dante Scruggs was her man. The thought of their future intimacy made him shiver: He would make himself known to every inch of that brown body before they were through. Then he would take her down to the Green River.

  But first he waited for a sign; there, the horse by the hitching post. Its tail twitched to the left, then again: twice in a row.

  Yes. The Voices wanted this one____

  The woman turned a corner and he followed her.

  Against the concrete, brick, and cast iron of the new Chicago that had sprung up since the fire in '71, Dante Scruggs's native coloring provided remarkable camouflage. He wasn't handsome, but you wouldn't call him ugly. Average height, blond and boyish, features plump and mild, like his middle-class shopkeeper folks back in Madison, Wisconsin. He looked ten years younger than his thirty-nine and there was no way to pick him out of a crowd. He wasn't big; most of his remarkable strength was in his outsize farmer's hands: He could crack walnuts with 'em. Smart enough to stay one step ahead of the police and two away from jail, Dante showed the world a bland, kindly face. A person would never notice his glass eye unless they were up close and looking right at it; the iris, as blue as a robin's egg, had no pupil painted on it.

  Dante was a breed of man the mechanized world had only just begun to produce. He moved through life casting no shadow while inside he was all hooks, darkness, and ripping pain. He had long ago given up resisting the Voices he heard in his head, and he believed with a servant's humility that once he read their signs it was simply his job to obey.

  He pictured the city as a jungle and himself a predator at the top of its food chain; that gave a dignity to what he perceived as his life's work. The U.S. Army had thought enough of his appetite for handing out discipline to make him a platoon sergeant. He put fifteen years in before the massacre at Wounded Knee revealed to his superiors the extent of Dante's enthusiasm for expressing his true nature.

  Soldiers in his unit who had been near him dining the engagement testified that Dante had lost all human restraint after that Dakota arrow took out his eye. But then again, they argued, with his sight so badly damaged, how could he be expected to distinguish women and children? The Army had grudgingly bought that argument, buried his excesses in the cover-up. A quiet discharge with honors soon followed, fully pensioned.

  Dante interpreted his misfortune differently; the wound opened up a whole new world. He imagined that his lost eye had simply been turned around to look inside and clarified the Voices. And ever since he'd been so grievously wounded, the Voices granted him permission to exact the sort of retribution he'd only been able to dream about: nine murders in three years that nobody would ever connect him to.

  With his pension coming in, he didn't need money so Dante devoted himself to what he had heard gentlemen shooters on the range call "the thrill of the hunt": He'd hired out as a buffalo scout before enlisting in the Army and had nothing but contempt for these rich, idle easterners taking their shots at stationary bulls a hundred yards away. They had it all wrong; the thrill was in the close work, hands on, that's what he discovered. Careful, thorough, calculating. He liked to show his ladies the Green River and then take 'em there, slow and easy, devouring their fear along the way.

  And this one was an Indian. That was just gravy on his meat.

  This squaw didn't know where she was going, that much was clear, and she didn't know Chicago: looking for street signs, wandering without direction. He didn't care what she was doing here alone; thoughts like that turned them into people and made the magic go away. Her family would be back on the reservation where they belonged; this one was a skipper so Dante felt no impulse to hurry. With prime meat, he liked biding his time. He had followed a woman halfway to Springfield once, hanging back, waiting for the right moment to make his move. That was what made courtship so suspenseful; it might take days or weeks before an opportunity presented itself. But once he'd locked on to one, he never let go until the work was finished.

  She took the stairs to a boarding house he knew on Division Street—ladies only, lodging by the week; good, she was planning to stay awhile. Dante had seen this pattern so many times; woman comes into town, finds a low-end job, waitressing, maybe seamstress in a sweatshop. Time passes and the work grinds her down to one of those nameless, faceless bodies no one notices passing by them on the street. Trudging back to her room alone every night. Bone weary, looks wearing out fast. Taking meals with the other thin-faced women in the boarding house; he could see 'em sitting prim and proper through the Irish lace on the dining room windows. Maybe she finds a friend among them and they talk without much hope about meeting a man some day, a fellow who won't treat them too bad, provide some kind of a life. Smoking cigarettes on the back porch, breath steaming in the cool evening air. Washing up in the shared bathroom down the hall, never all her clothes off at the same time. Sleeping with her meager dreams.

  Women like empty cups. Drifting through life waiting for something to happen. Now he was here and the waiting was over. Her Me would have meaning.

  She would see the Green River.

  There she was in a window. Second floor, near the back. That's fine; settling in. The Voices told him it was safe to leave now. He knew where to find her.

  But for all his focus on the Indian, Dante Scruggs remained unaware that someone was following and watching him. A dark, quiet man, with a distinctive round tattoo—a circle pierced by lightning—on the inside crook of his left arm. He waited for Dante to pass, then walked slowly after him, blending into the crowd.

  YUMA, ARIZONA TERRITORY

  Nobody in the hobo camp could remember seeing a Chinaman on the bum before, and in the philosophizing way common to these kings of the road, they viewed it as a true signifier of hard times. Their aversion to capitalism's twin addictions— work and money—did not erase from their minds an abiding curiosity in the larger workings of the world: Their indolence actually gave them more time for sizing up the human condition. Bums kept their ears to the rails of social change; at every stop on their circuit, there were men who made a point of studying discarded newspapers and discussing the evident faults of man like disapproving archaeologists. These hobos were more aware than most good citizens that six hundred banks had failed in the last year, that two hundred railroads had gone bankrupt and over two and a half million people were out of work in America; those kinds of numbers put respectable folk out on the road, crowding up their camps, and made life thornier for the professional vagabonds. Sad-faced men pissing and jabbering about their marital problems or how much they missed their jobs. That line of self-pitying blather turned a real bum's stomach.

  The tramps knew, too, that Chinese were family people who took in their own and kept to themselves when things went sour, so when a Chinaman showed up riding the lines, that qualified as news. Slocum Haney said he'd hopped a freight in Sacramento and this chink was already in the boxcar. Never said a word between there and Yuma, not even when spoken to. Never saw him sleep or eat; he just sat in the corner watchful as a cat. Haney didn't even know if he understood English or not. Something crawly about the man, even now, sitting out there alone on the edge of the circle round the bonfire.

  "You talk to him, Denver," said Slocum Haney. "You worked with Chinamen before."

  Denver Bob Hobbes commanded universal respect
from his peers based on his longevity on the bum and a habit of straight talk; in the egalitarian world of the hobos, he held an unofficial post of elder statesman emeritus. He'd been a working stiff once, came west from Ohio pounding rails on the transcontinental back in the sixties, when one day picking potatoes in Pocatello, Idaho, twenty years ago he saw the light and vowed never again to lift his hand in the service of another man's profiteering.

  Denver Bob had kept that promise and studied himself into an authority on the economic exploitation of the working man. He'd marched on Washington with Kelly's Industrial Army in '93 to protest the industrial workers' plight—and besides there was nothing like political demonstrations for free food and good company. Bob claimed to have met Walt Whitman once, always carried with him a dog-eared edition of Leaves of Grass, and he could talk about the nobility of poverty and life on the open road to a complete stranger until all the oxygen in the neighborhood was depleted. If the presence of this Chinaman was upsetting the harmony of the camp, then Denver Bob saw it as his responsibility to set things right.

  "You get cold snaps like this in October here in the desert," said Denver Bob, setting his plump butt down on an empty copper wire spool beside the Chinaman. "Most men start moving toward California around this time of year but it seems to me you've just come from there."

  He offered the man a swallow of the homemade raisin jack they'd brewed the night before. The man shook his head and kept his eyes straight ahead. Denver Bob wasn't used to people turning down his generosity—he was big and round and with his thick, white beard and apple cheeks he looked like Father Christmas—but it didn't set him back. Not much did.

  "This camp's been here ten years now, ever since they opened the line from Los Angeles. Hundreds of men pass through these yards every season." The shanty camp occupied the outskirts of the switching yards at Yuma, the major interchange between Los Angeles and the Arizona Territory, on the banks of the Colorado River. "Do you speak English, my friend?"

  The man looked directly at him for the first time; Denver Bob felt a chill scamper over his scalp. Not that there was any overt threat in those dull black eyes. There was just... nothing. No personality, submission, false good humor. No Chinaman he'd ever known looked or acted anything like this.

  "I am looking for work," the man said.

  "Work? Well, that feeling comes over a man from time to time," said Denver Bob, bringing his well-oiled geniality to bear. "He don't know whether to shit or wind his watch; it's like a fever, see; best thing is to lie down, have a drink, and wait for it to pass."

  "I work with explosives," said the man, immune to Denver's merry creed of sloth.

  "Is that a fact?"

  "Demolition."

  "Yes, I follow you. So you're a working man." Whatever else he might be, this fella was no tramp. Didn't seem much like a railroad hand neither for that matter; too self-possessed, independent. Maybe a miner who just lost his stake. No matter: Everything about the man gave Denver Bob the willies; if there was anything he could say or do to get him out of camp and on his way, it couldn't happen fast enough.

  "Where do I find this work?"

  "As a matter of fact, brother, I can tell you exactly. They're still putting in the spur line between Phoenix and Prescott through the Pea Vine; I hear tell there's tunnels to dig and canyons to trestle aplenty, enough to keep a double shift crew working round the clock for another year."

  "Where?"

  "North-northwest. You can hop a night freight to Phoenix over yonder near the swing bridge, leaves around midnight, have you there by morning."

  "The Santa Fe Prescott and Phoenix Railroad."

  "That's the outfit; you'll find their offices right there at the Phoenix rail station. Sure they can set you up nicely—work's scarce most places these days, but a fella with a handy skill like yours is always in demand. Here's wishing you and your ancestors good fortune." Denver Bob raised his tin can of hooch and drank a toast, thinking: You got your marching orders, friend, now remove your spooky ass from my yard.

  The man offered no acknowledgment or gratitude and directed his look back to the bonfire. Then something speared the man's attention; he sat up stiff as a bird dog on a scent.

  Before Denver Bob could react, the night air around them split with a chorus of piercing whistles; that could only mean one thing, and the cry went up throughout the shantytown.

  "Bulls!"

  Railroad cops and Pinkerton men had been running rousts through the hobo camps since the Pullman railroad strike in Chicago that previous May; violent, head-busting rampages, setting fire to the shanties and scattering whatever bums they didn't toss in prison to the winds. Through the summer, the bulls had worked their way down through St. Louis and along the tracks out toward the western camps, preceded by survivors' eye-popping accounts of the indiscriminate and malicious mayhem directed at their brothers. No more free rides, that was the new company policy. Seemed the railroad barons wanted their rails and stations sanitized so as not to offend the refined sensibilities of the middle-classers migrating westward and upon whose traveling dollar the Trust had decided the future fortunes of their railroad depended.

  Fifty tramps basking in the numb glow of an alcoholic haze and the bulls burst in from behind a line of boxcars before a single one of them could reach his feet. Twenty head-busters, sneaking in like thieves; an ambush, nightsticks and sawed-off baseball bats in their hands, and they go right to work— most of these bums had endured a brick yard beating or two in their day but this was a whole new game. These boys meant business.

  Two cops with torches set fire to the tinderbox shacks; the bulls had made their rush from both flanks, stampeding the hobos into the center of the yard, falling, colliding over each other, trapped as minnows in a net. Most knew enough to go to the ground, shelter their heads and absorb as much trouble as they could with the meat of their backs. Any man who tried to run was cut down around the knees and pummeled viciously. Scalps split open, collarbones cracked, blood flowed into pools.

  Denver Bob fell at the first whistle, wrapped himself around the spool he'd been sitting on and waited for the blows to rain down on him. He looked back at the Chinaman, ready to yell and tell him to grab some dirt but the man was gone.

  A big yard-bull raised his bat to swing at the tramp standing by the handcar, holding on to his long bundle. The bum gestured as the bat arced down at him and the blow never connected. The bull looked down in surprise; he clutched only the handle of the bat in his hands, sheared off, a clean cut just above his knuckles. As he looked up, the bum swung his arms around again—a chink, fer Christ's sake—and the bull felt something go haywire with his left leg; he tried to take a step and the leg split in two above the knee; his whole leg from foot to mid-thigh tipped away from him and flopped onto the ground; an instant later, the man's balance gave out and he toppled like a felled pine.

  This makes no sense, thought the bull. The chink has a sword in his hand. No pain yet but he couldn't breathe. He looked up and saw the sole of the chink's boot screaming toward his face.

  Kanazuchi had no time to offer a prayer for the dead guard as another one charged up quickly behind him, weapon raised high. He dipped, back-kicked, and the out-of-control guard flipped over him and fell heavily; Kanazuchi grabbed the man's wrist and with a single twist removed his shoulder from its socket. A single blow across the bridge of the nose from the stick the guard had wielded drove a splinter of bone into his brain and silenced the man's screams.

  Kanazuchi looked around, instantly analyzing the scene: Although they possessed far greater numbers, the men in the camp offered no resistance. None of the other attackers yet taking notice of him or the damage he'd done, preoccupied with the beatings. More of them darting in between the rail cars to his right. Fires flaring dangerously in the burning shacks in front of him. A cold, treacherous river at his back.

  Cornered. Capture, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of these men, carried a high probability.

 
Kanazuchi settled his breathing, remaining alert, wishing for nothing, escorting the fear from his body with every measured exhale.

  There it was—an opening. A narrow gap in the attackers' formation under a water tower led to the rail bridge heading east. He would need to depend on the darkness and the chaos in the camp and keep the Grass Cutter out of sight in order to traverse the fifty yards.

  Another guard took a run at him. Kanazuchi flowed to the ground, rose up underneath him and used the man's own momentum to toss him onto the roof of a burning lean-to. Moments later the man emerged screaming, flapping his arms like a bird, wrapped in flame. Distracted guards focused toward the burning figure and now he had his opportunity: Holding Grass Cutter in its sheath along the line of his pant leg, Kanazuchi began to walk across the yard.

  Huddled beneath his spool, the guards hadn't found Denver Bob by the time it happened so he was the only man in the camp who saw the entire rush of the Chinaman clearly from start to finish. In the days to come, even with the leeway his eminence among his peers allowed him, it proved a tough tale for anyone to swallow. If the bodies of the seven bulls and the heads of the two Pinkerton men hadn't been left behind for all to see in the morning light, they would have called Denver Bob crazy to his face.

  "The Chinaman moved like he was made out of liquid instead of solid flesh," Denver Bob grew fond of saying, but those were just words that did pale justice to a memory; as it was happening before him, he could hardly make sense out of what his eyes reported.