The Shotgun Arcana (17 page)

“I want to congratulate you on the job your boys pulled up there in Verdi,” Mitchell said. “Real innovative, robbing a train. I think you fellas may be on to something there.”

One of the men on the back of the wagon removed the canvas cover and handed Chapman another saddlebag. Chapman busied himself loading it onto the fresh horse.

“There’s the food, water, compass and maps and all the rest you were asking for,” Mitchell said, watching Chapman struggle with the bags. “I have to ask, Mr. Chapman, sir, have you been in this business long … robbing, I mean? I know the fellas that pulled the job have been hitting the Wells Fargo lines for years, but I was just wondering…”

Chapman spun, looking nervous and agitated. “I am trying to get the hell out of here! Jesus, you are the most damn chatty criminal I’ve ever met! The law is everywhere and they are looking for me! No, no, I’m not a hardened criminal, I’m a Sunday school superintendent, for fuck’s sake! I planned it and it’s going to make me rich and I am done with it, you understand, damn it!”

Mitchel nodded serenely to one of his men on the horses. “Oh I do, sir. I do. Perfectly. Now toss that gun on over here.”

The two men on horseback leveled their guns at Chapman.

“What … what the fuck is this?” Chapman sputtered.

“Such language from a Sunday school teacher,” Mitchell said. “I figured you were new at this when you pulled that wad of shin plasters out of that saddlebag. In my estimation your take of the forty thousand dollars is in there, and I’m afraid I’m just too greedy a son of a bitch to let that money ride off, especially with such a criminal mastermind like yourself.

“It’s a shame really. So many genuine villains out west these days, real hard cases, and a shave-tail like you comes along with a fine idea like robbing trains. Irony. Throw down your saddlebags and that iron on your hip and you can ride on out of here on that expensive new horse you just bought.”

Chapman opened his mouth but no sound came out. His hand wavered near his pistol and Highfather knew what the fool was thinking. Highfather took a breath, stood and leveled the rifle on Mitchell’s chest. The moon was rising behind him and silhouetted him to the party below.

“Mitchell!” Highfather shouted. “It’s Jon Highfather. We got a bead on you dead-bang. I want all of you to lay down arms and be still and there will be no trouble.”

“He’s alone,” Vellas said, still smiling to Mitchell. “All alone.”

“Shut the fuck up!” Mitchell said to Vellas. Chapman was panicking, looking up at Highfather and then back to Half-Guts, his hands moving near his gun and then up to his chest again and again.

“Wouldn’t recommend you do that, Mr. Chapman,” Highfather called out. “Good way to end up dead.”

Clement looked at Half-Guts.

“He’s s’posed to be a dead man, Mr. Mitchell,” Clement said.

“So I hear,” Mitchell said. “Let’s find out. Light ’em up, boys!” he shouted to his men, and then dived for cover behind the wagon.

Highfather remembered his first battle. It was in the war, at First Manassas. Larson, his brother, had nearly pissed himself. Jon saw the plumes of gun smoke vomit out toward them and this great, soul-stealing fear had come over him, began to eat him. He looked at his little brother and heard the hiss, felt the heat of an angry round narrowly miss him. And the fear was gone, and the paralysis with it. He moved to cover Larson and advanced with his fellows, his gun cracking as he fired into the lines.

“Follow me, stay low,” he shouted back to his brother, and Lawson nodded and did as he was told. And they lived, and Jon Highfather learned the secret to surviving a fight: have something in you stronger than fear.

The two men on horseback, Clement, and the gunman in the back of the wagon all opened fire on the shadow before the moon. The shadow dropped and tumbled down the hill, covered by the night and the tall grasses, the bullets a swarm of hornets whining all about. The shadow came up in a crouch, rifle in hand, shotgun slung in a back sheath. The rifle bellowed as Highfather fired. The man up in the wagon grunted and staggered backward, but stayed on his feet and returned fire. Highfather cocked the lever on the rifle and fired again. The lantern exploded and darkness swallowed the hillside. There were the flares of fire from the gun barrels and some burning oil splashed on the side of the wagon, but not enough yet to give much light.

Highfather skirted to the right, keeping low and moving through the grasses toward the old shack. He cocked the Winchester, chambering a fresh round. Mitchell’s boys were still firing, chopping up the grass where he had been a few seconds ago. Mitchell was a wily old grayback and he’d get them under control in a second, start directing their fire and then Highfather would be in trouble. He was too far away for the shotgun to be much more than an annoyance right now. He had to get closer, but closer was not an easy thing at the moment.

He heard shouting and wild galloping in the direction of the western road down the mountain. Mitchell was cussing. That would be the great train robber, Chapman, rabbiting. The distraction gave Highfather a few seconds and he took them.

He bolted for the shack, firing with the rifle again as he cleared the cover of the grass onto the open dirt crossroads. He had committed the rough locations of the shooters to his mind’s eye and now he aimed from memory and calculated anticipation of movement. A hot branding iron scraped his left arm and it felt like a steam locomotive at full speed clipped him. Highfather staggered, almost fell but stayed on his feet. He flipped the Winchester, cocking the rifle’s lever with his one good hand—the one holding it. The gun rocked back into his hand, the lever snapping back into place. It was a tricky maneuver, and Highfather had spent a lot of time practicing it. The practice paid off. The rifle barked again, Highfather using the flash from the shooters’ barrels as a target. He dived through the doorless entrance of the old abandoned shack a second ahead of a dozen bullets and fell on the cabin floor, made up of cold dirt, the rotting remains of wooden planks and molded canvas.

There was a whirr near his ear. Highfather looked up slowly into the shovel-headed face of a hissing rattler a few feet away from him. The snake was resting on part of a rotted board, scared, and coiled to strike.

The Six of Cups

“Quite an entrance,” Bick said to Emily, as he closed the door to his office. “You certainly display the theatrics of someone who is my daughter. Please, have a seat, my dear.”

Emily sat on the tufted red leather love seat that was near the office door. “Thank you,” she said. “I came a long way to meet you, to look you in the eyes, and I’m afraid I simply did not care to wait. My apologies.”

Bick laughed as he walked to the liquor cart to the left of his desk. He poured himself a tumbler of cognac from an ornate rectangular cut-glass bottle. He proffered the bottle to Emily and she declined with a shake of her head.

“No need for apologies,” he said. “I understand completely. And, again, a character trait well in keeping with my child.”

“I
am
your child,” Emily said to Bick’s back. The saloonkeeper didn’t turn.

“Yes, Bick said. “You are.”

“Mother died giving birth to me,” Emily said. “Her family was not terribly kind to a bastard. With all the wealth they had at their disposal, they could have hired someone to care for me and I’d never have been spoke of again. However, they deemed it more efficacious to simply drop me on the steps of ‘the old brown house’ of the Sisters of Charity. I was less than a year old.”

“You speak very well, given your upbringing,” Bick said.

“Thank you,” Emily said. “I worked very hard to do so. Books were the only family I had, growing up.”

“There are worse families, I can assure you,” Bick said as he sat on the love seat, beside Emily. “What was it like, the orphanage?”

“I always felt different,” Emily said. “Alone. I endured the place. When I was old enough I was released, I worked whatever jobs a girl of my position could find and I discovered I had a talent for painting, like my mother. I struggled but I survived. One day Caleb came to me with money and his story … and yours.”

“You know what you are? What I am?” Bick said.

Emily nodded.

“I am the daughter of an angel and a human woman. I believe the theological term is Nephilim?”

“I was with your mother for almost a year,” Bick said. “I wanted to be with her forever. She was a brilliant artist, Emily. I met your mother when I was in a bit of a crisis about my purpose and the Almighty’s intentions with the universe, with people. I was led to ponder that perhaps God was not as benevolent as I had come to believe He was in His plans and experiments. I saw your mother’s work in a gallery in San Francisco and it was like the human soul speaking to me, reassuring me, when my God was silent and would not. I determined I had to meet the artist, to know her. My duties forced me to return to Golgotha. I sent word for her that I wanted her to join me. I received word back she had died giving birth to you.” He paused at the memory. “Years later, I told Caleb about you, when he first came to me and told me he wanted to search out all his brothers and sisters.”

“How many of us are there?” Emily asked.

“I couldn’t say,” Bick replied.

“That many?” Emily said. “So I’m not the only one that you lost track of. How did Caleb come to find you?”

“That is a very long story for another day,” Bick said. “Caleb spoke of you often and with great pride. If you had a guardian angel in your life, it was him, not me.”

“Yes, he was,” Emily said. “He was very kind to me. I loved him very much. He took good care of me; he spoke of you often too. He tried to explain the way you were, explained that you couldn’t be different any more than the ocean could not be wet. He told me you loved him, loved me and loved all of us in your own ways, as best you could.”

“If you had written to me earlier, I could have been prepared to meet you at the stage,” Bick said, “or arranged more civilized methods of conveyance for you to Golgotha.”

“I liked the stage,” Emily said. “All those people jostled together, the coughing, the smells—even the stink! The stories they told, the songs. It was so … alive.”

Bick nodded. “Yes. I feel that way whenever I visit a large city.”

“Besides that, I wanted to surprise you,” Emily said. “I wanted to see you without preparation. I wanted to ask you why you let me spend over seventeen years in an orphanage in San Francisco.”

Bick drained a good third of his glass in a single drink.

“Because,” Bick said, “I am a black-hearted villain. You’ve been in town a few hours, surely you must have heard that by now?”

“I have yet to fully experience your reputation firsthand,” Emily said. “It sounds as if I will have something to look forward to. Caleb, of course, told me about you from his experiences being with you.”

“And what did he say?” Bick asked.

“That you traffic in prostitutes and deal with criminals and worse,” she said.

Bick feigned surprise and insult.

“I am a respectable, upstanding pillar of this fine community. One of the founding fathers of Golgotha, if you will, since my family was here even before the Mormons arrived.”

“Your family?” Emily asked.

“I must change my identity every so many decades to avoid being discovered for my true nature. I have taken the name Bick for some time now.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” Emily said.

“I am a sober-minded sage, town elder and civic leader,” he said, raising his glass in salute.

“Who consorts with evil men,” Emily added.

“I do,” Bick said. “I truck with malefactors most foul, politicians even! I have for a very, very long time, my dear. It has been my sad experience that the ‘criminals and worse’ of this world are the ones who have the power and the will to get things done. I wish it were otherwise, but that whole ‘meek shall inherit the Earth’ homily isn’t very likely.”

“How can you say things like that?” Emily said. “Given what you are, where you come from? You know better, don’t you?”

Bick finished his drink and walked over to the cart to make another one. “An excellent question: Who better than an angel of the Lord to know the ethical landscape of the cosmos? If only it were that easy.”

“It … it isn’t that easy?” Emily asked. “You’re an agent of God Almighty. You were created directly by God—the one true God—to act in His name across the universe. You…” She paused and pointed to the drink in Bick’s hand as he sat back on the love seat. “Does that even affect you?”

“It does if I allow it,” Bick said, and took another swallow from the glass. “And at the moment, I’m allowing it. So, God Almighty…”

“Yes,” Emily said. “You … you’ve seen Heaven, lived there, right? You have seen God, spoken to Him.”

Bick leaned closer to her, his eyes intent. “Tell me, Emily. Do you recall much about your early life when you were an infant, when you were one, two years old?”

“No, not really,” she said.

“It’s the same for me,” he said. “I have been here for millions of years, Emily, living in flesh more than spirit for most of that time.”

Bick emptied the tumbler again. He looked at the empty crystal.

“I remember … it is very cold here compared to there,” he said. “I remember that when God looked at me, when He spoke to me, it was the most contented feeling I have ever experienced, but I cannot hold His face in this piece of meat you call a brain. I can’t remember most of Heaven anymore, but yes, I know it is real.”

“You said ‘He,’” Emily said. “God is a man? That’s what they say in church.”

“God simply is.” Bick said. “Humanity embraced It. They gave It color and gender, shape and form. They put words in Its mouth. They always have and they still do, perhaps they always will. I experience God as a ‘He,’ but God is too vast to be held prisoner by language or biology.”

“‘They,’” Emily said, “not ‘you.’ Humanity is ‘they’ to you and me. I’m not human, am I? I mean, I’ve known for years, but when I hear you say it, it becomes real. I’m outside the things you are talking about.”