The Bread We Eat in Dreams (15 page)

I don’t know much about the beginning, but in the end it was just the Wizard of Los Angeles and the Wizard of New York and the shoot out at the Burnt Corn Ranch. They walked off their paces; the moon seconded New York and the sun backed up Los Angeles and I saw how it all went down because I was there, hiding under the bar in the Gnaw Hollow Saloon with my fist between my teeth. Now you may call me a coward and I’ll have to wear that, but I’m a coward who lived, and that’s worth a drink if it’s worth two.

Robert and Pauline

Now, as I recollect it, the Wizard of Los Angeles sold his name for a pair of Chinese pistols, a horse the color of a rung bell and a crate of scotch the likes of which, god willing and the dead don’t rise, you and I will never taste. I hear that scotch has no label. I hear it tastes like a burning heart. I hear it’s served at the Devil’s own table, distilled by Judas Iscariot and aged in a black bull’s skull.

The Wizard of New York traded her name for a train she could fit in her pocket, a horse with two hearts, a dress like the fall of Lucifer, and a satchel of tobacco combed out of Hades’ own fields, dried on a rack of giant’s bones. New York was always the better haggler, and that’s a deal you only get to make once.

You gotta do something about names, see. Gotta get rid of them, double fast. Can’t get too far in the game with a name someone could just
call
you, out in the open, like Robert or Pauline. People like that, you can find them on a map. You can book them tickets and put a tax on them. Robert and Pauline couldn’t of done what those two did. Robert and Pauline have a nice little spread out Montana way. Pauline’s butter is just the sweetest you ever had. Robert never breaks his word, that’s just the kind of guy he is.

Come on. That ain’t how it runs. The Wizard of New York don’t churn her own cream.

Anyway, at least they both got horses out of it.

A Coupla Rules

You mighta heard it said that New York is where they make good magic and Los Angeles is where they make bad magic. Well, I don’t know about that. I never been to either place. What I want to say is there’s no one to root for here, okay? Those two chose to play the game. They didn’t have to. They couldof had babies and grown oranges or beets or whatever the hell people grow when they aren’t circling a scrap of black dirt in the middle of nowhere like they’ve got a clock for a heart, set two minutes til. You might be tempted to say well, New York is cold and hard and I don’t care for that in a woman, or you might say Los Angeles is all illusions and unreal bullshit, and I don’t care for that in anyone, but the Burnt Corn Ranch don’t care about your sniffing and side-choosing, and it don’t care about nobody else either. It’s always been there, and it’ll be there when whatever walking hamburger is left clears out.

There’s a coupla rules.

Everybody’s gotta have a second. That’s good sense—the kind of arsenal these kids bring with them is music for four and six hands, if you get me. They hafta agree on a judge, too. Cheating don’t come into it.

It’s not always New York and Los Angeles. This has been going on awhile. This bit here is just the endgame, where the board is mostly clear, and every piece who mighta hid you has got itself killed or sacrificed and every move comes naked and grave. I remember when the Witch of the Mississippi shot the Baron of Nebraska in the eye with a glass flintlock she got off the corpse of a drifter with a diamond in his tooth. Probably somebody’s second, poor fuck. When she fired the thing, it filled up full of hot green fire. Smelled like licorice. Weren’t even a year ago New York hunted down the Hag of Florida, cut her up with a bowie knife blessed by the Pope of the Hudson, baptized in gin and olives and christened What Did I Just Say.

Fed Florida to her alligator friends piece by piece. They cried, but they ate her anyway.

There’s different sorts of ways to get rank in this business. New York has to be born there, and Brooklyn and Queens don’t count, neither. If I remember it correct, she has to be born there, and her mother dead in childbirth, foot can’t have touched grass nor mud, hand can’t have sewn nothing nor cooked nothing, and she can’t ever have finished a novel, but she’s got to have started three. No more, no less. Los Angeles has to come from somewhere else. He’s gotta be in pictures, naturally, but never a lead, only in the background, at best maybe a line or two. His daddy’s got to have died while his momma was with child, he can’t everof et Old World fruit, can’tve been baptized nor shriven, foot can’t have touched the sea, hand can’t have touched the color red.

The rules look stupid on purpose. That’s how folklore works, on a fool’s own engine.

Still, sometimes there’s more than one bastard stumbled into the conditionals, and then there’s what you might call attractions to shuffle it down. New York wants to be a woman. The Bishop of Wisconsin wants to be a little boy with black hair. That sort of thing.

Motion across the board goes from the edges toward the center. Used to be a rule about collateral damage, but that seems beside the point now. Hardly anybody left here but us chickens.

And then there’s the prize. Didn’t I mention? That’s me. Hunkered down behind a bar with bourbon showering down on my hair and glass exploding in slow-motion.

I’m the Bride.

The Devil’s Mare

I suppose you want to know how it got to this. Truth is I don’t know. I wasn’t born til the players were on the stage. That’s kind of the point of me. I was born at Burnt Corn Ranch on the summer solstice and I came out of a pinto mare just as human as you like. Maybe you don’t like too much, and that’d be about right. Back then Burnt Corn were run by Tincup Henry and his girl name of Ashen. When she was a skinny little cough of a thing her mother said she whored with the Devil and ate of the bread of Dagon. She locked that girl in the barn with the new lambs and lit the whole thing on fire. Possible she knew what was coming, possible she was crazy. Ashen’s eyelashes and eyebrows and all her hair burnt off before her brother Cutter (who happened to be the Duke of Maine, but he didn’t know it yet) run out in all the stink of burning wool and beat the flames off with his own hands. 

Ashen probably had a name before her skin went grey like that. Probably a nice, fancy one like farmers give their daughters when they hope for better days. But dead girls get new names, and Ashen just wasn’t the same before she went into that barn as when she came out. And it ain’t just about her being bald and hairless as a worm forever. Her momma run off and her daddy drunk himself into nothing. But when Tincup married her, well, you never saw anything like that wedding table. Loaves of bread like wheels on a cart and a cake like a house of sugar. Ashen didn’t say nothing.

And that’s who raised me up. No idea what they thought when that mare lay down to foal. But they named her Almagest, so maybe they knew the score after all. When they pulled me out of her nethers, Tincup scratched his head and picked me up, full grown and covered in horse. He put me in the house by the stove like any other foal born sickly.

Day I was born Ashen started baking. Every day of my life smelled like something rising.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

Met an old prospector once, by the name of Gilly Spur. She lived down the gulch, panning for prophecies in the dried up wrinkled scrub that usedta be the Colorado River. Caught a rack of runes once, all fishbone scorched with hairline scratches. For all the good it ever did her. The Khan of Manitoba cut off her hand to get them, and took off south after the Witch of the Rio Grande. Anyway, once upon a while I liked to sit with Gilly afternoons in the summer, when it was so hot the only safe places were down in the low, down in the shadows, down in the crevices where the dust don’t fall. She caught butterflies to eat, and you know I never thought a butterfly’d have eating on ‘em, but the big, warped-looking busters huffing heavy on the old river bed weren’t nothing but flying protein, and protein is king. Gilly Spur snatched them out of the air in a mason jar.

“Tell me who I’m gonna marry, Gilly,” I’d say to her while she crunched down on a monarch wing. “I heard girls before used to pull daisy petals to find out. Think that’d work for me?”

“Don’t you be in such a hurry, girl. The rest of us ain’t done here yet. And where you think you’re gonna spy up a daisy?”

“Do you remember before? Before there were a mess of wizards and popes shooting up the place, I mean.”

“Ayup,” would say Gilly Spur. And she’d tell me about something like bubble gum, which was a thing you chewed in your mouth but didn’t swallow what had sugar in it. People used to be mad as cats, chewing on something and not eating it. Or she’d say there used to be an ocean left of California, which was so much water you couldn’t see the other side, and why the world didn’t just drink up so much of the good stuff just sitting there I’ll never understand. I’m glad I wasn’t born then. It sounds a terrible place.

Gilly Spur’d scry the sand like it was still water. Far as I know she weren’t in the game then or never. But she was nice to me, and she knew how to hide real good. Best thing to learn these days, but I never got the trick of it.

Mr. Junction City Savings

This is what the Wizard of New York did with her name. She put it inside an angry boy name of Johnny Holler, then killed a red-tailed deer out on the Connecticut saltwaste using Johnny just like a rifle. Took the dried-out hollowed heart of the beast and the name too and locked them up in the Junction City Savings and Loan vault, and gathered her goods-in-kind from the Loan Officer—a saggy droop of a man who used to be fat and lost it somehow, just lost track of his whole body til it was nearly gone and just a big blouse of skin left. He’s the line judge, the referee, the fact checker and the clock-watcher. Don’t know his name. Don’t even know if he knows it. He’s just the Loan Officer, Mr. Junction City Savings, only man I ever met who still owns a three piece suit and a tie to match his hanky.

Mr. Junction City Savings put Johnny Holler down in his book as New York’s second. Johnny said:
I never asked
. But it don’t matter. New York takes. New York brooks no refusing.

From just about then Johnny Holler started getting brighter. Sure, smarter—you can’t get clued in on the big game without sharpening up a bit. But he started glowin’ like a lamp turned on inside him, and all the time they walked out to Missouri to see about the Caliph of St. Louis he just kept shining brighter still. By the time I met him, you couldn’t look at him without squinting. His bandoliers screaming silver just like the moon.

Los Angeles nailed down his second up Oregon way. A minor player, Princess of the Siskyous or something, lanky tall white girl answering to Sally Rue. The Wizard of Los Angeles pricked up when she started making her name, strapped up his big snort of a horse and rode it all the way from Alamagordo where he’d fucked and then detonated the brain-stem of Abbot of New Mexico with a one lightning kiss.

Come on now. Don’t make a face. I told you it wasn’t a pretty thing, when these kids count off their paces. 

Anyway, Los Angeles sniffed up the Princess just as soon as he crossed the Tahoe naphtha sink, smelled her like musk and cattle. Rode on north like an arrow. Put a blade between his teeth and hit the big empty college green where the Princess was sitting down to cards with her sad little second, boy by the name of Frank Bust. Los Angeles sat himself on the grass and played a hand or two, not winning nothing and not looking to, just taking a friendly trick when he could. When the sun got low he spat his black knife just as quiet as breathing, right between Frank Bust’s eyes. Kid didn’t see it coming to say shit, just gogged while Los Angeles brushed the hair out of the Princess’s Frank-spattered face and kissed both the her cheeks, said something in Algonquin or Greek or some such and pulled on her jaw like a trigger. Nothing came out—she was saving the bullet down in the deep of her for the end, and that made her Los Angeles’ kind of girl. He hauled her out to Junction City quick as a wedding.

She was already looking a little god around the edges. Her teeth shone like hard sunshine.

Somethings

Something bad happened a long time ago. In the bubblegum daisygirl ocean days, when there were rivers where the rivers are. I’d like to know about it, much as you, much as anyone. Seems like a worthy thing to know. But I don’t make what you’d call a real effort to find out. I got my own problems. My own somethings bad. For awhile I thought it had to be a bomb. Something big and bright and final. They used to have bombs like that. That left black dust even after they’d stopped burning everybody up, and something else, something invisible, something that changed you if it touched you. Sounded right to me.

And the dust that comes down in the summer will burn you clean through.

But apart than Gilly Spur the oldest soul I know is Blue Bob who lives at the top of a grain silo sharpening scissors for bread, and he said he never saw nothing blow up but what does he know, he never lived in a city that mattered enough to bomb. He says the mail stopped one day. Then the running water and a little after that you started noticing people’d gone missing. Just gone, blinked off like a fuse. He’d taken the last of his gas and headed to Cheyenne and got drunk for weeks off of the stuff lying around with no one to guard it. Blue Bob says he’s not really sorry. He likes the quiet.

He’s the Emperor of Wyoming. Told me once, half upside-down in a bottle of mash. It’s not that he can’t fight, he just doesn’t care. Doesn’t like the world enough to care. Blue Bob kissed me all over then, and I kissed him back even though he was so old you could see through him. I like kissing. Kisses are big and bright and final. Just because I’m writ down for the Burnt Corn Ranch doesn’t mean I gotta be a virgin when I get there. Can’t see no point in virginity myself. I’m not gonna live so long I should wait on much of anything.

Here’s what I think, though, at the end of everything behind the bar with the bourbon and the dog and the commotion outside.