Dead Man’s Hand (4 page)

Immediately on touching the gold gun, Caleb felt strange. The gun had the weight of
the old pistol it resembled, and the cut of the handle felt familiar, like a thousand
gun handles he’d held before. But on holding it he felt a radiant discomfort, traveling
up his fingertips from the gun, up through his arms, down into his guts. It gave him
a rolling kind of feeling in his stomach. He put the gold gun down, and the old man
picked it up and tucked it back in his satchel.

“Now,” said he. “Here’s the proposition.”

* * *

The gun finds gold, is what the old slow man, the man who said he was from Neptune,
explained to Caleb and Crane. The gun finds gold. You take it out, he said, when you’re
outside, when you’re at a patch of ground or a length of creek. You hold it up, and
you don’t even pull the trigger.

“What do you mean, you don’t pull the trigger?” said Crane. Caleb was silent—had been
silent since holding the gun and feeling the way it made him to feel.

“I mean just that, son. You hold it, you point it, and it jerks and jumps kinda, it
dances, and it points the way to gold. To the real thing.”

Caleb and Crane stared at the old man, wide-eyed, rapt.

“So here’s what we’re gonna do, you and me, boys,” said the old man—Caleb and Crane
listening intently, chewing on their mustaches, straining their minds. “We spend two
days out on your claim, relying upon the alien wisdom of my device, running its powers
over your patch of dirt. We pull more gold out of that mudflat than the two of you
with your pans and your hands have scrabbled up in the last six months.”

“What then?” said Crane.

“What then? We split it, sixty percent to you two, forty percent to me.”

“Awfully business-minded, ain’t ya?” observed Crane. “For a man from space?”

“I got no choice.” The old man shrugged. “What you people call gold, my people call
food. And me and my people, we’re running out.”

“Food?” Caleb broke his silence; this fresh bit of strangeness was too much for him.
“You tellin’ me that people from the dark side of Neptune, whatever you said, you
tellin’ me they eat gold?”

The old man nodded, scratched his forehead, and a crust of skin fluttered down to
the floor. “Not just the dark side. Lightsiders, too. That’s just what Neptunians
eat. Back home, son, people’d look just as funny at you, if you told ’em you ate ham
and eggs.”

Caleb fell silent. Crane, meanwhile, rubbed his furrowed brow, focused agitatedly
on the practicalities of the matter. “I don’t get it, old man. Your gun’s so smart,
why’n’t you just take the thing out to the claim your own self? Or out to any other
claim? Dig up as much as you want and make off with it? Dig yourself up a nice gold
feast and leave Earth for good?”

“Would that I could,” said the old slow man, looking around the ramshackle cabin.
“But I’m tired. Where I come from, a man needs methane in his air, and the atmosphere
on this damnable planet of yours, it’s got no more methane than a bucket of spit.
Wears a man out. I can’t even lift a shovel in this heavy soil of your’n. I’m weak.
Lookit me! Every hour I spend here saps my strength. Even standing here I feel my
bones cracking, my heart pumping too fast to keep me alive! I need a couple of young
strong Earthlings to do the digging fer me—and, like I said, I’m willing to pay for
it!”

Overwhelmed by this vigorous outburst, the old slow man began to cough, and he coughed
so violently that he nearly doubled over in his chair. Then he settled back and closed
his eyes, while Caleb and Crane huddled their dusty heads together.

“You know what he wants us for,” Caleb said to Crane. “He wants us for mules.”

“Yes,” Crane said to Caleb, and then paused. “At sixty percent.”

A smile played at the corners of the lips of the old slow man. Up they all stood,
and down they went to the claim.

* * *

The gold gun from space worked just like the old slow man said it would. Why, it worked
like the absolute devil.

They walked down to the claim together, the three of them, down to that rutted quarter
acre with the twist of creek down the center of it, and stood at the edge. The old
man drew the gun forth and pointed it. Didn’t even pull the trigger—“you never pull
the trigger” he said—and no bullet flew forth. The chamber did not turn. But the gun
jerked and danced in the old man’s hands, and the muzzle jumped and poked in a certain
sharp direction, like the nose of a dog when it’s caught a scent. Caleb and Crane
watched this performance with astonishment, and when it was done they looked in the
direction that the gun had pointed, and saw that over the land in that spot the air
seemed disrupted somehow, seemed to twinkle and dance; the air above that spot of
land was like tissue paper that had been wrinkled and smoothed out again, and now
shimmered prismatically in the daylight.

And there they dug, and there they found gold. Not flakes and small bits, but ounces
of it, nuggets, thick gorgeous clots of gold.

“Eureka!” shouted Caleb, and Crane said it, too: “Eureka!”

And then again, and then again, all that cool September morning, the old man would
point the gun and its metal nose would jerk and dance; Caleb and Crane would clabber
over to where the air above the ground or above the creek was disrupted, twinkling,
textured, where the atmosphere had been set to sparkling—and they’d get to it with
their shovels and hoes, and out would come the gold—the gold formerly so elusive,
revealing itself to them, singing out to them, making itself known, like a coy lover
suddenly eager to be taken.

“Eureka,” hollered Caleb, every time he heard the satisfying cling of his shovel’s
edge on a patch of the real deal.

“Eureka,” erupted Crane, each time he felt the sharp resistance of metal striking
metal down there in the muck, that beautiful jolt traveling up the sinews of his forearm.

The old slow man sat on his haunches on the edge of the claim, aimed his gun, watched
it work, watched Caleb and Crane chase the reward. Watched them pour the gold-flecked
grit into the cradle, sluice it clean, watched the golden pile grow. And then, after
the fourth drawing of the gold gun, with only but a bare eighth of the claim covered
so far, under the hot sun and his labored existence, the the old man yawned and stretched
and tilted back his head and fell asleep.

Caleb and Crane noted that he was asleep, and looked at him, and looked at each other.

As was so often the case, both of them were thinking the same thing at once—it was
only a matter of who would speak it first. It was Crane.

“Forty percent is awful high,” is what he said, whispering the words, pushing his
wire glasses up the bridge of his nose where they had slipped on the slick of sweat.

“Awful high,” Caleb agreed, nodding slowly, clapping caked dirt off his palms.

This was all that needed to be said. Because the gold gun was not the only armament
down at the claim that day. Caleb had his hunting rifle tucked up inside his coat,
the butt of it down there in his waistband, just as he did every day, in case of wild
cats or gold thieves or other predators. Now he drew that old rifle free from his
pants and walked up the slope, while Crane stood down in the dirt, nervous, his eye-glasses
glinting against the sun. Caleb walked resolutely on his thick tree-trunk legs up
the muddy slope of the claim and killed the sleeping old man without ceremony, a single
brutal blast right through the center of his head. The body tipped over backwards
on the rocking chair and slipped soundlessly down into the dirt.

The thing done, Caleb turned and looked down at Crane, who shielded his eyes against
the sun and then slowly trudged up the slope, too, to stand there between his companion
and the body of the man he had killed. Caleb looked saddened by what he’d done.

“Do you think—” began Caleb, and then stopped himself, sighed. His eyes were brimming
with tears. “D’ya think he was really from Neptune?”

“Yes,” answered Crane, speaking softly, like he was speaking to himself. He bent and
lifted the gold gun off the corpse of the old slow man. “He was.”

“What?” said Caleb.

Crane pulled the trigger of the gold gun and a wash of wild blue fire poured from
the muzzle, a blanket of heat and light in the air, surrounding Caleb, smothering
him, boiling him alive. In an instant—a flash. Big Caleb died with a scream trapped
on his lips, frozen in place as all his organs failed at once as the light washed
over him.

No more gold-fever, no more desperation, no more sad glitter of hope for he.

As for Crane, he held the flintlock pistol aloft and looked it over and whistled appreciatively.
Those clever bastards from the dark side of the planet were always so much further
ahead in the technology department, they really were. They couldn’t survive on foreign
planets near half as well as lightsiders like him, but dang could they manufacture—a
gold gun, indeed!

Crane hunched over, grabbed a handful of glittering metal from the massive pile he
and his poor dead partner had gathered up, and chewed it thoughtfully. There was no
way around it: this gold gun heralded a major improvement in his lifestyle. Pickings
had been so slim, the take so small, that to get enough to eat, he’d needed a partner.
But it had been stressful, all the sneaking around—waking in the middle of the night,
eating enough of the other fella’s share to live on, but not enough to be caught.
It had been an anxious, furtive existence, but he’d got by: May to June, June to July,
August to September. Now everything would be different. Now he’d bury these two bodies,
and then Crane would feast.

—
for Nick Tamarkin

Morgan Gray sat alone, peering into his crackling campfire, eyes unfocused, thinking
of girls he’d known. In particular, there was a dance-hall girl he’d once met in Cheyenne.
What was her name—Lacy? She’d had red hair and the prettiest smile—so fine he almost
hadn’t noticed that she’d worn nothing more than a camisole, bloomers, and a green
silk corset while she lay atop the piano and sang.

For weeks now, he’d been trailing a skinwalker, a renegade Arapaho named Coyote Shadow,
but the skinwalker had taken to bear form and lost Morgan in the high rocks of the
Wind River Range.

A schoolmarm murdered, her child eaten. Morgan hadn’t been able to avenge them.

Sometimes you lose a trail
, he knew.
Sometimes you lose the fight. You have to figure out how to keep fighting.

He downed some coffee, as bitter and cold as the trail.

Out in the rocky hills, a wolf howled. It sounded wrong, a little too high. Could’ve
been a Sioux warrior, hoping to count coup. Morgan would have to watch his horse tonight,
sleep with one eye open.

The burning ponderosa pine in his campfire smelled sweet, like butterscotch boiling
over in a pan. Some pitch in the heartwood popped. A log shifted, and embers spiraled
up from the fire. They rose in balls of red, and seemed to expand, dancing around
one another as they sped toward heaven.

Morgan watched them drift higher, wondering when they’d wink out, until time stretched
unnaturally, as if the embers planned to rise and take their place among the stars.

Suddenly, The Stranger took form across the campfire, a shadow solidifying into something
almost human, sitting on a rock.

Morgan had met him only once, seven years back: a man in a black frock, like a traveling
preacher. He wore his Stetson low over his eyes and had a wisp of dark beard. The
spurs on his boots were made of silver, with glowing pinwheels of lightning. The cigar
clenched between his teeth smelled of sulfur.

Could’ve been an angel. Could’ve been the devil. Morgan’s gut told him that The Stranger
was something different altogether.

“Long way from Texas,” The Stranger said in a deep voice, lips hardly moving.

Morgan had no authority outside of Texas. So he kept his ranger’s badge in his vest
pocket. “Justice shouldn’t be bound by borders,” he said. “The whole world’s gone
crazy.”

The Stranger smiled. “Got a job for you.”

Morgan should never have asked this stranger for a hand. Might have been better to
just let Handy drown in the quicksand. With these folks, there is always a price.

But, hell, he’d loved that gelding.

“A job?” Morgan asked. “I catch ’em. Don’t necessarily kill ’em.” He’d seen too much
bloodshed in the war. After more than ten years, the scars were just beginning to
heal.

Morgan wasn’t afraid of a fight. Once you’ve stared death in the face a few times,
nothing riles you. Yet…

“He’s good with a gun,” the stranger said. “Few men would stand a chance against him.
He’s a clockwork gambler, goes by the name of Hellfire. Shooting one of them… it’s
not the same as killing flesh…”

It should be more like stomping a pocket watch. Clockworks were all springs and gears
inside. But Morgan had known a clockwork once, a soldier by the name of Rowdy. Morgan
swore that the thing was as alive as any man of flesh and blood. Rowdy had once joked,
“Us clockworks, we got souls same as the rest of y’all. Ours are just wind-ups.”

“What did it do?”

“Fought alongside Jackson at Chancellorsville,” the stranger said, as if to ease Morgan’s
mind. “Is that enough?”

Morgan had always hated slavers. “The war’s over.”

“This one still kills,” the stranger said. “Not sure why. Some say he took a knock
from a cannonball in the war. When the gears turn in his mind, he cannot help himself.
The last victim was a boy, sixteen years old. Hellfire called him out. Before that,
he shot a Chinaman, and before that, a snake-oil salesman. Each killing is four months
apart—to the minute.”

The stranger spat into the fire. His spittle burst into flame, like kerosene, and
emitted a rich scent that reminded Morgan of blackberries, growing thick on the vine
beside a creek.