The Gunfighter and The Gear-Head (19 page)

“Fuck, you don’t have to look at me like
that,” Fiona said.

“You’re not taking care of yourself.” Gieo
knelt beside the bed, dipped her hand in the pitcher of water, and
began rubbing her damp hand along Fiona’s back. “I’m worried about
you.”

“You and everyone else.”

“I’m not everyone else,” Gieo said. “I’m
your…something.”

Fiona relaxed a little, allowing Gieo access
to more of her skin. The water felt amazing and Gieo’s hands were
delightfully soft. “That tears it, though,” Gieo said. “I’m doing
all your cooking from now on, and you’re going to eat what I say,
drink when I say, and not get heat stroke again unless you have
written permission from me.”

“You can cook?” Fiona asked.

“Oh, sweetie, you’d be hard pressed to find
something I can’t do.” Gieo gave her a little wink and dipped her
hand back in the pitcher.

After a long night of keeping Fiona’s skin
properly wetted, fanned, and cooled, Gieo was awoken by the early
morning sun warming her as she slept, half on the floor, head and
arms on the bed. Fiona was finally sleeping comfortably after
fitfully tossing and turning all night. Fiona had drunk enough
water that Gieo thought her stomach might start pooching out, but
had never once needed to use the bathroom. Gieo felt Fiona’s
forehead and found it normal on the side of cool. She closed the
windows, pulled the shades, and draped several blankets over the
curtain rods to block out all but the most stubborn of light.

Gieo made for the door with the nearly empty
pitcher in hand when Fiona awoke and rolled over to face her. A
little squeak from the mattress springs stopped Gieo at the
door.

“Where are you going?” Fiona croaked. In the
dimly lit room, still bleary-eyed and frizzy-haired from a rough
night of sleep, she looked far more innocent and sweet than Gieo
knew her to be.

“I was going to get you some more water, make
breakfast, and see about earning some more of this new money we
just got saddled with,” Gieo whispered, although she wasn’t sure
why she was whispering as the only sleeping person in the room was
awake and talking.

“Don’t bother with the money,” Fiona said,
rolling onto her back. With her toe, she nudged the bag she’d been
carrying the night before, nearly knocking it off the foot of the
bed where she’d set it. “Veronica gave me more money than we could
use and told me I could have more whenever I wanted.”

“Oh,” Gieo said. Her mind immediately kicked
into high gear. Fiona had spoken with Veronica, exchanged something
for money, and had an open invitation to return for another
exchange at any point. Of course she did. They must have been
friends, good friend, girlfriends even, on-again/off-again sex
partners, lovers of epic proportions whose tale could only be
captured in classic poems or sappy songs written and sung by
multiple Grammy winners! The only role left to Gieo in this play
was as the jilted, foolish girl who hurls herself into the Grand
Canyon as a romantic, but ultimately futile, gesture to prove her
unrequited love. The only songs sung about her would be depressing
ballads about how she fooled herself into…

“Where did you go just then?” Fiona asked.
“You drifted off and kind of stared into space.”

“The Grand Canyon,” Gieo said. “I’ll go make
you breakfast.”

“Veronica wants to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say airships.”

Gieo took the cryptic message downstairs to
the kitchen, filled the pitched with the hand-pumped well water,
and set to work looking for something worthwhile to cook. Mitch’s
new kitchen boy, Bond-O, a great oaf of a man with only three
fingers on his left hand, was busy rattling pans and burning what
might have once been identifiable as food when she walked in.

“Hey, Go!” Bond-O shouted and waved with a
three-fingered hand covered in what might have been cornmeal based
pancake batter.

She had her doubts about Bond-O’s capacity to
learn cooking beyond what he had already picked up from baking mud
pies as a child, but she would have to try. First things first, she
had to get a hairnet on the wild mane of black hair on his head and
the equally erratic beard he’d clearly tried to trim at some point
with garden sheers—with mixed results from the looks of it.

“I hate to say this, but we’re going to have
to be kitchen buddies for awhile until the food improves around
here,” Gieo said with a weary sigh.

“Bond-Go buddies!” the man-child shouted in
delight with a big thumbs-up. He popped his batter covered thumb in
his mouth, bit down hard, and yelped a little before dissolving
into giggles. “Mitts were my cook buddy for awhile before the
knife-ccident.”

Gieo had no idea why Mitch, or ‘Mitts’,
thought Bond-O would make a suitable cook, but the old bartender
seemed to be the only man in town with patience enough to find a
use for him. Rumors were that the big lug was a refugee from a
state mental hospital, most likely suffering from extreme
developmental delay. Having the mind of a five-year-old trapped in
the body of a Hell’s Angel enforcer seemed a particularly cruel
irony to Gieo, although hadn’t apparently dampened Bond-O’s
spirits. At least, she noted with no small amount of surprise,
someone had pounded a highly fastidious nature into the gentle
giant. He was the cleanest Tombstone resident, aside from Gieo, and
still occasionally gave her a run for her money in the neat and
tidy department. He’d taken to sleeping in a shed outback, which
was quickly cleaned to a shiny polish and decorated in enough
brightly colored flower prints and pictures to rival any little old
lady’s sitting room. Watching him beat eggs with his three-fingered
fist, she couldn’t help but wonder what tragedy had befallen him
before Mitch found him on the side of the road, petting a cow
skull, and singing Cher’s greatest hits to himself. For better or
worse, she was going to be his second kitchen buddy until a
knife-ccident or a sudden epiphany of culinary genius on his part
separated them.

After several hours, and several near misses
with accidents of more than just the knife variety, Gieo had
managed to pull together something resembling food from the meager
means provided. Bond-O staples like sawdust, rat droppings, and
what might very well be fiberglass insulation shredded extra-fine
were removed from the menu entirely to be replaced by actual food,
which Gieo had to send the oversized fry cook to purchase around
town with the fifty coins she’d earned the day before. She returned
to Fiona’s room by midmorning with a plate of bacon, eggs, stewed
tomatoes, and cactus strips in southwest chili sauce.

Fiona awoke at Gieo’s return, but didn’t seem
nearly as interested in the food as she was in the jug of water.
She drank greedily and rolled over to go back to sleep. Gieo set
the steaming plate on the nightstand and swatted Fiona hard on the
rear end with a satisfying thwack. Fiona rolled over without much
of a response.

“You’re going to eat and you’re going to
thank me for my astounding patience on your behalf.”

Fiona squinted at the food and sniffed the
air. She crawled across the bed to get a better look. “That looks
like actual food.”

“Yeah, and it was neither cheap, nor
easy.”

“I’m not that hungry,” Fiona said.

“You better get hungry, because that food is
going inside you one way or the other.”

Fiona drew herself up to a sitting position
in the bed and pulled the plate onto her lap. She ate quickly
without real recognition that the food actually tasted like food.
The Tombstone diet of utter shit was a source of pride for most of
the hunters; they saw it as a test of their toughness to eat and
survive on what would kill a lesser being. Gieo had pointed out how
patently stupid that was, but Fiona had only shrugged and said
that’s just the way it was. Gieo was just about done with Fiona’s
shrugs and ‘whatever’s; from then on out, Fiona’s apathy would be
met with aggressiveness. The food vanished in a matter of minutes.
Fiona tossed the plate aside and let out a long, loud burp.

Gieo retrieved the plate and headed for the
door.

“Where are you going?” Fiona asked.

“To shower, to sleep, to walk out into the
desert never to be heard from again…I haven’t really decided.”

“Thank you for breakfast.” Fiona scooted back
in the bed, clearing a little space. “Now come cuddle with me and
take a well-deserved nap.”

Gieo nearly burst into frustrated tears on
the spot. She walked to the bed with mincing steps, pulled off her
riding boots, and crawled into place beside Fiona. “Did the mighty
gunfighter and huntress just say ‘cuddle’?”

Fiona wrapped herself around Gieo in an
intimate way they hadn’t really ever gotten around to in the week
they’d shared the bed upon Gieo’s arrival. The comforting position
of breathing in the smell of Fiona’s skin with her face nestled
under Fiona’s chin nearly put Gieo into a blissful sleep on
contact. Fiona gently stroked the back of Gieo’s neck with the very
tips of her fingers in idle passes.

“If you tell anyone I said cuddle,” Fiona
whispered. “I’ll have to kill them.”

“So only people I don’t like?” Gieo whispered
back.

“Exactly.”

Chapter 13:
The history of Vegas
chess.

By early
afternoon, even the makeshift curtains constructed of blankets
couldn’t hold out the heat of the day. Gieo awoke and reluctantly
left Fiona’s embrace. Fiona stirred when she slipped away, but
rolled back to sleep shortly after. Gieo checked Fiona’s forehead
to make sure the fever hadn’t risen again. Thankfully, the
gunfighter seemed to be thermal regulating on her own. Gieo pulled
on her boots and slipped downstairs to seek out food for Fiona.

Bond-O and Mitch were trying to work the
kitchen together through a lulled lunch crowd. With the hunters
free to come and go as they pleased, the town had gone back to
being nearly empty during the day. Sandwiches appeared to be on the
menu, although with the whimsical approach Gieo had come to know as
commonplace with Bond-O’s cooking. Anything he had two of could
create the outsides while anything that couldn’t be counted on to
hold together as an outside piece was relegated to filling. Some of
the sandwiches seemed like reasonably creative attempts, while
others were patently ridiculous. Gieo took two of the pancake
sandwiches. The first had a filling of tomatoes and apples, while
the second was stuffed with slow-cooked chicken pieces, chilies,
and pickled okra. The other, less appealing options seemed to be
two slabs of unidentifiable, undercooked meat surrounding cactus
strips and ancient powdered donuts all held together with peanut
butter.

As she was departing, she waved to the
enthusiastically learning Bond-O and smiled; his food contained
actual food now at least. The thought occurred to her that Bond-O
was a little like Fiona in that both of them were far better off in
the new world order. She wondered how many of the survivors of the
invasion and the cataclysm perpetrated by man in retaliation were
somehow better off than they’d been before civilization crumbled.
She was happy that Bond-O would never again know the medicated
stupor of a mental hospital and that Fiona could find a useful
outlet for her chaos tics. Still, something about the thought
nagged at her.

Until she’d seen the upside of the invasion
and fall of man for so many, Gieo hadn’t ever really thought about
exactly what she’d missed out on. The summer the Slark invaded, she
was preparing for college at MIT. The world was opening up to her
in beautiful ways that spoke of a life on the cusp of blossoming.
Now, she was teaching a mental patient how to cook to avoid
malnutrition, nursing a dangerously violent woman back to health in
hopes of developing a relationship with her, and attaching electric
toothbrushes to tea kettles as her primary means of support. The
realization settled a sullen cloud over her. She’d had to be a
survivor on her own for so long, seeing opportunity in catastrophe
for lack of any other option, that she’d never really let herself
wallow in what was actually stolen from her by the Slark. She’d
grieved for her parents, for her favorite TV shows, for the pop
singers she’d liked that were no doubt dead, but she’d never
mourned for the loss of the person she was meant to be.