The Very Best of F & SF v1 (37 page)

The gunslinger
touched the brim of his hat. “I’m grateful. It’s good to know someone in this
town is bright enough to talk.”

He walked past,
mounted the boardwalk, and started down toward Sheb’s, hearing the clear,
contemptuous voice of one of the others, hardly more than a childish treble: “Weed-eater!
How long you been screwin’ your sister, Charlie? Weed-eater!”

There were three
flaring kerosene lamps in front of Sheb’s, one to each side and one nailed
above the drunk-hung batwing doors. The chorus of “Hey Jude” had petered out,
and the piano was plinking some other old ballad. Voices murmured like broken
threads. The gunslinger paused outside for a moment, looking in. Sawdust floor,
spittoons by the tipsy-legged tables. A plank bar on sawhorses. A gummy mirror
behind it, reflecting the piano player, who wore the inevitable gartered white
shirt and who had the inevitable piano-stool slouch. The front of the piano had
been removed so you could watch the wooden keys whonk up and down as the
contraption was played. The bartender was a straw-haired woman wearing a dirty
blue dress. One strap was held with a safety pin. There were perhaps six
townies in the back of the room, juicing and playing Watch Me apathetically.
Another half-dozen were grouped loosely about the piano. Four or five at the
bar. And an old man with wild gray hair collapsed at a table by the doors. The
gunslinger went in.

Heads swiveled
to look at him and his guns. There was a moment of near silence, except for the
oblivious piano player, who continued to tinkle. Then the woman mopped at the
bar, and things shifted back.

“Watch me,” one
of the players in the corner said and matched three hearts with four spades,
emptying his hand. The one with the hearts swore, handed over his bet, and the
next hand was dealt.

The gunslinger
approached the bar. “You got hamburger?” he asked.

“Sure.” She
looked him in the eye, and she might have been pretty when she started out, but
now her face was lumpy and there was a livid scar corkscrewed across her
forehead. She had powdered it heavily, but it called attention rather than
camouflaging. “It’s dear, though.”

“I figured.
Gimme three burgers and a beer.”

Again that
subtle shift in tone. Three hamburgers. Mouths watered and tongues licked at
saliva with slow lust. Three hamburgers.

“That would go
you five bucks. With the beer.”

The gunslinger
put a gold piece on the bar.

Eyes followed
it.

There was a
sullenly smoldering charcoal brazier behind the bar and to the left of the
mirror. The woman disappeared into a small room behind it and returned with
meat on a paper. She scrimped out three parties and put them on the fire. The
smell that arose was maddening. The gunslinger stood with stolid indifference,
only peripherally aware of the faltering piano, the slowing of the card game,
the sidelong glances of the barflies.

The man was
halfway up behind him when the gunslinger saw him in the mirror. The man was
almost completely bald, and his hand was wrapped around the haft of a gigantic
hunting knife that was looped onto his belt like a holster.

“Go sit down,” the
gunslinger said quietly.

The man stopped.
His upper lip lifted unconsciously, like a dog’s, and there was a moment of
silence. Then he went back to his table, and the atmosphere shifted back again.

His beer came in
a cracked glass schooner. “I ain’t got change for gold,” the woman said
truculently.

“Don’t expect
any.”

She nodded
angrily, as if this show of wealth, even at her benefit, incensed her. But she
took his gold, and a moment later the hamburgers came on a cloudy plate, still
red around the edges.

“Do you have
salt?”

She gave it to
him from underneath the bar. “Bread?”

“No.” He knew
she was lying, but he didn’t push it. The bald man was staring at him with
cyanosed eyes, his hands clenching and unclenching on the splintered and gouged
surface of his table. His nostrils flared with pulsating regularity.

The gunslinger
began to eat steadily, almost blandly, chopping the meat apart and forking it
into his mouth, trying not to think of what might have been added to it to cut
the beef.

He was almost
through, ready to call for another beer and roll a smoke when the hand fell on
his shoulders.

He suddenly
became aware that the room had gone silent again, and he tasted thick tension
in the air. He turned around and stared into the face of the man who had been
asleep by the door when he entered. It was a terrible face. The odor of the
devil-grass was a rank miasma. The eyes were damned, the staring, glaring eyes
of those who see but do not see, eyes ever turned inward to the sterile hell of
dreams beyond control, dreams unleashed, risen out of the stinking swamps of
the unconscious to confront sanity with the grinning, death’s-head rictus of
utter lunacy.

The woman behind
the bar made a small moaning sound.

The cracked lips
writhed, lifted, revealing the green, mossy teeth, and the gunslinger thought:
—He’s not even smoking it anymore. He’s chewing it. He’s really
chewing
it.

And on the heels
of that: —He’s a dead man. He should have been dead a year ago.

And on the heels
of that: —The man in black.

They stared at
each other, the gunslinger and the man who peered at the gunslinger from around
the rim of madness.

He spoke, and
the gunslinger, dumbfounded, heard himself addressed in the High Speech:

“The gold for a
favor, gunslinger. Just one? For a pretty.”

The High Speech.
For a moment his mind refused to track it. It had been years—God!—centuries,
millenniums; there was no more High Speech, he was the last, the last
gunslinger. The others were—

Numbed, he
reached into his breast pocket and produced a gold piece. The split, scabbed
hand reached for it, fondled it, held it up to reflect the greasy glare of the
kerosene lamps. It threw off its proud civilized glow; golden, reddish, bloody.

“Ahhhhhh...” An
inarticulate sound of pleasure. The old man did a weaving turn and began moving
back to his table, holding the coin at eye level, turning it, flashing it.

The room was
emptying rapidly, the batwings shuttling madly back and forth. The piano player
closed the lid of his instrument with a bang and exited after the others in
long, comic-opera strides.

“Sheb!” The
woman screamed after him, her voice an odd mixture of fear and shrewishness, “Sheb,
you come back here! Goddammit!”

The old man,
meanwhile, had gone back to his table. He spun the gold piece on the gouged
wood, and the dead-alive eyes followed it with empty fascination. He spun it a
second time, a third, and his eyelids drooped. The fourth time, and his head
settled to the wood before the coin stopped.

“There,” she
said softly, furiously. “You’ve driven out my trade. Are you satisfied?”

“They’ll be back,”
the gunslinger said.

“Not tonight
they won’t.”

“Who is he?” He
gestured at the weed-eater.

“Go—” She
completed the command by describing an impossible act of masturbation.

“I have to know,”
the gunslinger said patiently. “He—”

“He talked to
you funny,” she said. “Nort never talked like that in his life.”

“I’m looking for
a man. You would know him.”

She stared at
him, the anger dying. It was replaced with speculation, then with a high, wet
gleam that he had seen before. The rickety building ticked thoughtfully to
itself. A dog barked brayingly, far away. The gunslinger waited. She saw his
knowledge and the gleam was replaced by hopelessness, by a dumb need that had
no mouth.

“You know my
price,” she said.

He looked at her
steadily. The scar would not show in the dark. Her body was lean enough so the
desert and grit and grind hadn’t been able to sag everything. And she’d once
been pretty, maybe even beautiful. Not that it mattered. It would not have
mattered if the grave-beetles had nested in the arid blackness of her womb. It
had all been written.

Her hands came
up to her face and there was still some juice left in her— enough to weep.

“Don’t
look!
You don’t have to
look at me so mean!”

“I’m sorry,” the
gunslinger said. “I didn’t mean to be mean.”

“None of you
mean it!” She cried at him.

“Put out the
lights.”

She wept, hands
at her face. He was glad she had her hands at her face. Not because of the scar
but because it gave her back her maidenhood, if not head. The pin that held the
strap of her dress glittered in the greasy light.

“Put out the
lights and lock up. Will he steal anything?”

“No,” she
whispered.

“Then put out
the lights.”

She would not
remove her hands until she was behind him and she doused the lamps one by one,
turning down the wicks and then breathing the flames into extinction. Then she
took his hand in the dark and it was warm. She led him upstairs. There was no
light to hide their act.

VI

He made
cigarettes in the dark, then lit them and passed one to her. The room held her
scent, fresh lilac, pathetic. The smell of the desert had overlaid it, crippled
it. It was like the smell of the sea. He realized he was afraid of the desert
ahead.

“His name is
Nort,” she said. No harshness had been worn out of her voice. “Just Nort. He
died.”

The gunslinger
waited.

“He was touched
by God.”

The gunslinger
said, “I have never seen Him.”

“He was here
ever since I can remember—Nort I mean, not God.” She laughed jaggedly into the
dark. “He had a honeywagon for a while. Started to drink. Started to smell the
grass. Then to smoke it. The kids started to follow him around and sic their
dogs onto him. He wore old green pants that stank. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“He started to
chew it. At the last he just sat in there and didn’t eat anything.

He might have
been a king, in his mind. The children might have been his jesters, and the
dogs his princes.”

“Yes.”

“He died right
in front of this place,” she said. “He came clumping down the boardwalk—his
boots wouldn’t wear out, they were engineer boots—with the children and dogs
behind him. He looked like wire clothes hangers all wrapped and twirled
together. You could see all the lights of hell in his eyes, but he was
grinning, just like the grins the children carve into their pumpkins on All
Saints’ Eve. You could smell the dirt and the rot and the weed. It was running
down from the corners of his mouth like green blood. I think he meant to come
in and listen to Sheb play the piano. And right in front, he stopped and cocked
his head. I could see him, and I thought he heard a coach, although there was
none due. Then he puked, and it was black and full of blood. It went right
through that grin like sewer water through a grate. The stink was enough to
make you want to run mad. He raised up his arms and just threw over. That was
all. He died with that grin on his face, in his own vomit.”

She was
trembling beside him. Outside, the wind kept up its steady whine, and somewhere
far away a door was banging, like a sound heard in a dream. Mice ran in the
walls. The gunslinger thought in the back of his mind that it was probably the
only place in town prosperous enough to support mice. He put a hand on her
belly and she started violently, then relaxed.

“The man in
black,” he said.

“You have to
have it, don’t you!”

“Yes.”

“All right. I’ll
tell you.” She grasped his hand in both of hers and told him.

VII

He came in the
late afternoon of the day Nort died, and the wind was whooping up, pulling away
the loose topsoil, sending sheets of grit and uprooted stalks of corn
windmilling past. Kennerly had padlocked the livery, and the other few
merchants had shuttered their windows and laid boards across the shutters. The
sky was the yellow color of-old cheese and the clouds moved flyingly across it,
as if they had seen something horrifying in the desert wastes where they had so
lately been.

He came in a
rickety rig with a rippling tarp tied across its bed. They watched him come,
and old man Kennerly, lying by the window with a bottle in one hand and the
loose, hot flesh of his second-eldest daughter’s left breast in the other,
resolved not to be there if he should knock.

But the man in
black went by without hawing the bay that pulled his rig, and the spinning
wheels spumed up dust that the wind clutched eagerly. He might have been a
priest or a monk; he wore a black cassock that had been floured with dust, and
a loose hood covered his head and obscured his features. It rippled and
flapped. Beneath the garment’s hem, heavy buckled boots with square toes.