Dead Man’s Hand (3 page)

As it sprang, the Reverend, weary, fell back and brought the rod up. The sky grew
darker as the thing came down in a blind lunge of shape and shadow. Its body caught
the tip of the rod, and the point of it tore through the monster with a sound like
someone bending too-quick in tight pants and tearing the ass out of them. The vampire
screamed so loud and oddly the Reverend thought the sound might knock him out with
the sureness of a blow. But he held fast, the world wavering, the thing struggling
on the end of the rod, slowly sliding down, its body swirling around the metal spear
like a snake on a spit, then bunching up like a doodle bug to make a knot at the end
of the makeshift spear. Then it was still.

The Reverend dropped the bar and came up on one knee and looked at the thing pinned
on it. It was nothing more now than a ball of bone and tattered flesh. The Reverend
lifted the rod and vampire into the wet grave, shoved the iron shaft into the ground,
hard. Rain and hail pounded the Reverend’s back, but still he pushed at the bar until
it was deep and the thing was beneath the rising water in the grave.

Weakly, the Reverend staggered down the hill, climbed over the debris in the cabin,
and dropped through the roof. He found a place in the corner where he could sit upright,
rest his back against the wall. He pulled out his .36 Navy and sat there with it on
his thigh, not quite sleeping, but dozing off and on like a cat.

As he slept, he dreamed the thing came loose of the grave several times during the
night. Each time he awoke, snapping his eyes open in fright; the fiend he expected
was nothing more than dream. He breathed a sigh of relief. He was fine. He was in
the cabin. There was no vampire, only the pounding of rain and hail through the hole
in the roof, splashing and smacking against the corpse of his horse.

The next morning, the Reverend climbed out of the cabin by means of his horse footstool,
and went out through the hole in the roof. He walked back to the grave. He found his
saddlebags on the edge of it, where they had fallen during the attack. He had forgotten
all about them.

Pistol drawn, he looked into the grave. It was near filled with muddy water. He put
the revolver away, grabbed hold of the rod, and worked it loose, lifted it out to
see if the thing was still pinned.

It was, knotted up on the rod like a horrid ball of messy twine.

The Reverend worked it back into the grave, pushing the bar as deep as he could, then
dropped to his knees and set about pushing mud and debris into the hole.

It took him all of the morning and past high noon to finish up.

When he was done, he took a Bible from his saddlebags and read some verses. Then he
poked the book into the mud on top of the grave. It and the rod would help to hold
the thing down. With luck, the redheaded dead would stay truly dead for a long time.

When he was done, the Reverend opened his saddlebags and found that his matches wrapped
in wax paper had stayed dry. He sighed with relief. With the saddlebags flung over
his shoulder, he went back to the cabin to cut offa slab of horsemeat. He had hopes
he could find enough dry wood to cook it before starting his long walk out, going
to where he was led by the godly fire that burned in his head.

—In memory of and tribute to Robert E. Howard

Whether Caleb and Crane came out to California separate and partnered up later on—or
whether they knew each other from some eastern clime and made their way westward as
a pair—well, who the devil can tell and what the devil does it matter? Suffice it
to say that whether they came to their claim as partners or came to it alone, Crane
and Caleb came the same as all the rest of ’em: maybe overland on some slow-rolling
desperation caravan from Oxford, Mississippi or Albany, New York, jouncing on rutted
wheels through Salt Lake, Deadwood, Barstow; maybe aboard a leaky old cutter, or rounding
down around Cape Horn, dipping and rolling on the seasick waves.

Some way or other, the point is, they came. Drawn like iron shavings to a magnet,
drawn to the golden promises of Sutter’s Mill. Drawn by hope, fool’s hope, by that
same mania that had lit up the eyes of poor men and rich men and credulous men and
wise, that had seized ’em up and drawn ’em down from all across the continent and
all around the world.

Caleb and Crane weren’t nothing special and never would they have been, if it weren’t
for the spaceman.

“Tomorrow,” Caleb would assure his partner, every night, before stretching out weary
on his thin rucksack, emptying out his day’s sad pocketful of flakes and powder. “We’ll
strike it rich tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Crane would answer, and then they’d close their eyes, the both of ’em
closed their weary eyes and dreamed their dead dreams of gold.

Tomorrow never seemed to come though, not for most of ’em out there, and certainly
not for Caleb and Crane. April through May, May to June. Heavy work, long days. Flakes
and dust, a teensy nugget now and again; now and again a tiny little half of a half
of a half ounce of gold. Nothing to speak of. Nothing to hold. Just enough to keep
you scratching at it.

This was the summer of 1851. Long ago the easy pickins had been picked. Long ago them
few big winners that was ever gonna be had filled their pockets, filled their buckets,
filled their wagonbeds up with gold and rolled away.

And yet they said it, Caleb and Crane, and felt it, too, in aching bones—needed to
know that it was true:

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.”

* * *

Caleb—so you know—was big. Legs like ox-legs, neck like a bull neck, torso like the
petrified trunk of an old-growth tree, sturdy and unbending. He looked not like a
man-of-woman-born, but like a figure of a man someone carved in a barn door and animated
by some manner of charm. A sturdy muscled golem, fit to hoe a row, work a shovel,
dig a mine.

Crane was little. Taut and thin and steely as a loop of wire, with a long nose, and
little delicate glasses perched on the end of it.

You’d have seen the two of them—Caleb with his ropy neck and ship’s-anchor fists,
Crane with his spectacles—and you’d have figured Crane was the brains of the operation.
But you’d’ve been wrong: there weren’t no brains to this operation. Just sweat and
hope and tired exhausted dreams of the mother lode.

June to July, August to September, camped out there on the lip of their rutted square
acre on the Sacramento banks, their dope’s claim. Giant Caleb and wiry Crane with
their ramshackle cabin and rickety apparatuses, digging and muttering about tomorrow;
six months their drumbeat was the flat thud of shovel on clay, the rat-a-tat of new
handfuls of gravel—the daylong rush of water sluicing through the Long Tom, the rusty
scrick of the cradle as it rocked, separating, separating, seeking.

If you’d’a said to big Caleb, at some point, that long summer, “You’re madmen, you
and your friend,” he’d’a laughed, a snorting bull’s laughter. Pointed you away with
the long barrel of his rifle.

If you’d’a said to Crane, “You’re madmen, you’re dunces—you’ll die out here before
you strike it rich,” he’d’ve chuckled bitterly, told you to go do something dirty
with a donkey, twisted his small bent body back to the work of his shovel.

It would’a been as crazy as to say that a man from Neptune will come, and make you
a strange proposition, and then die of violence on the banks of your claim.

That’s what happened though. One night—late September—that is indeed what did occur.

* * *

“Wake up, there, you boys. I got a proposition for you.”

This’s what the old man said by way of greeting, but too quiet to rouse Caleb and
Crane from their respective golden-castle dreams.

“Wake up, there,” he repeated, a little louder—loud enough, now.

“Who’s that?” said Crane, blinking awake.

“It’s a goddamn tramp,” answered Caleb, “is who it is,” and hefted himself into a
sitting position and landed his big bear feet on the dirt floor of the cabin. It was
so late it was almost early, almost the next day; the old man, ancient and tiny and
slow, was surrounded by dawn’s first glow, so that with his wild uncombed white hair
and his lined face, he looked a little like a saint, a little like a ghost.

“Oh, good,” muttered the man. “You’re stirrin’.”

The old man’s voice was harsh and gravelly. He was bent with age, and his right arm
was shriveled and deformed. His mustache was bushy, yellow, and unkempt. He wheezed
heavily. Over his shoulder was a black sack.

Caleb was on his feet by now, holding the old man steady with the creaky long-barreled
hunting rifle he’d fetched out from under his pillow. “The heck you want?”

“I already said.” The old man cleared his throat laboriously, tottered unsteadily
into the cabin, cast a quick glance at big Caleb’s long rifle like it was a children’s
finger-puller. “I got a proposition for ya.”

“Now wait a minute, wait just one minute,” sputtered Crane, snatching his spectacles
from beside his bedroll and sliding them into place. “Just who the devil are you?”

“Well I reckon that I could tell you m’name, but it won’t do much good,” said the
old slow man. His white hair was a wiry tangle atop his thin head. “It’s in a language
you won’t understand.”

“If you mean Spanish, you’re wrong about that,” said Crane, who prided himself on
his ¿como estas? and his uno-dos-tres, which he’d picked up off a Mexican whore.

The old man snorted. “Not Español, son. I’m from Neptune. The dark side of the planet
Neptune.”

There was a long silence in that moment, after the old slow man said he had come from
the dark side of the planet Neptune. In the dawn outside the cabin you could hear
the pleasant morning babbling of the creek, hear the gentle morning calling of the
California birds roosting in their California trees. If someone in the proper frame
of mind were there, they might have felt that the surroundings were downright peaceful.
It might have occurred, to such a tranquil observer, that whatever precious metals
were or were not to be found beneath the surface, there was a copious bounty of a
different kind—the squirrels at play, the sun glimmering off the green—right here
out in the open.

No one in the present company, however, was in such a frame of mind.

“Did you say you’re from Neptune?” said Caleb.

“Yep,” said the old man, and coughed. “The dark side.”

Caleb drew back the hammer of the rifle.

“What? Where is Neptune?” said Crane, looking from the old slow man to Caleb and back
to the man. “What is that?”

“It’s a planet,” said Caleb, gesturing heavenward with the barrel of the gun. “But
this man ain’t from there. He’s from a drunk tank or an alleyway. He’s a tramp and
a thief.”

“No, sir,” said the old man. “I’m from Neptune, like I said. And I got a proposition
for ya.”

“Nuh-uh,” said Caleb, and spat on the ground, and leveled his rifle at the old man’s
face. “See, I got a proposition for you. You get the hell out of our cabin, and get
good and clear of our claim, or I’m going to put a bullet inside your head. Right,
Crane?”

Crane didn’t say nothin’. He had taken off his spectacles and was staring at the old
slow man, squinting, as if merely by looking at him hard enough he could puzzle out
the truth or falseness of the man’s wild declaration.

“Crane?” said Caleb.

Still, Crane didn’t say nothin’. The old man, meanwhile, stared steadily back at Caleb
while the smallest curl of a smile turned up beneath his droopy mustache. “Go ahead
then,” he said. “Shoot me.”

It was almost comical, the bravado with which the old man faced Caleb’s rifle, given
how small he was—how frail—especially compared to the massive claim digger—how decrepit
with age.

“You’re crazy, old-timer,” was all Caleb could think of to say, while the old man
still stood there on his pipe-cleaner legs, and Crane stood there staring, scratching
his head. Caleb lowered the gun so it pointed at the floor, murmured it again: “Crazy.”

The old man looked around the cabin with rheumy eyes, wheezing slightly. Crane, in
the meantime, still staring at the old man, had brought out his pouch of tobacco.
“Oh, hell, Caleb,” he said, rolling himself a cigarette, “let’s hear what he’s got
to say.”

And that was that. Caleb shrugged, Crane pinched his cigarette closed at the ends,
and the old man was permitted to make his slow way into the cabin, and to take a seat
on one of the upturned packing crates that served for seats. And what he did next,
instead of talking, was he slowly drew open the drawstring of the bulging satchel,
and took out an antique flintlock pistol, dust-caked and rusted.

Caleb looked at Crane. Crane shrugged. Caleb looked back at the old man.

“You on your way to a costume party, old man?”

“No, sir.” The old man arched his eyebrows and chuckled throatily. “That’s a gold
gun. And it’s gonna make you boys rich.”

“A gold gun?” said Crane, softly. Thoughtfully, even. But Caleb was scornful and agitated,
shifting his big torso with irritation. “That thing ain’t gold.”

“I didn’t say the gun was gold,” said the old man. “It’s a Neptunian gun. It finds
gold.”

“It—what?” said Crane. But his tone was more and more thoughtful, and he was looking
with open interest at the battered old pistol, even as Caleb shook his head, kept
on his mask of incredulousness, said, “if that there is a magical space gun, why’s
it look like a regular old flintlock pistol from the goddamn Mexican war?”

“Well, why do I look like this? We aliens and our alien devices can’t go around showing
off our real appearances on your human planet. Your minds would burst and break from
the sight of it.”

“Hooey,” said big Caleb, and he stepped forward and snatched the gun from the old
man, who let it go willingly.