Effigy (20 page)

Turning on her heel, she crosses to the door and pushes it open into flooding moonlight. The yard is large, but hemmed in by human structures and therefore safe. She sets off counterclockwise along its margin, making her best attempt at a shuffling stroll.

The ranch—at least all she knows of it—rotates past. The privy, then the slat block of the washhouse, wafting lye. The vegetable plot. The house’s silent sprawl.

She skirts the redolent dark of the peach orchard to where the track bleeds off into blackness. Taking a breath, she crosses its double cut and veers to hug the mulberry copse’s verge. In its shadows the silkhouse sits quiet, the worms about their business in the dark. Ruth will have checked on them recently, or will be rising to do so soon.

As the last of the broad-leaved trees falls away, outbuildings stand in order of increasing size. First, the chicken house with its warning fox nailed flat. A waste of a good pelt, but Mother Hammer had insisted. Never mind the effect of that star-shaped skin on the already nervous birds. Their every day flavoured with its constant tang, the promise of a squawking, mangled death.

The cow barn seems peaceful by comparison, its inhabitants dark-eyed and dull. Dorrie continues on to the stable’s massive facade and lingers there a moment, steeling herself before rushing the last, curving leg of the way—the corral a tame gateway to a terrible expanse.

Which brings her back to the old adobe barn. Its high grey door is so worn as to seem furry. She lays her palm to it, lets it slide in a single downward stroke. Nothing awaits her inside. Only the same set of questions she’s been struggling with since the wolves arrived, the same maddeningly blank internal slate.

Behind her, a sound. She’s heard it a thousand times, but tonight every sense is tempered by the spectral light. The moan of the stable’s great door is the utterance of something alive.

She turns in time to see the new man lead Lal’s palomino out into the corral. There’s no mistaking the horse. It’s the only one of its colour on the ranch, coat caramel-brown, mane and tail pure cream—ashen now in the lunar wash, but the eye, adjusting, translates.
Bull
. An unkindness of a name. The rider’s is scarcely better—Brother Drown. Or, as he informed the family at table that first evening, Bendy. Whatever his name, he’s got his work cut out for him. Bull tends to bear a man’s weight like a grudge.

As though in defiance of her thoughts, Bendy Drown hooks his boot in the iron and mounts in a baffling, elastic surge. Dorrie blinks. Limbs like so many whip lengths, and then he’s settled between cantle and horn. He lets Bull stand for a moment before nudging him into a walk, nice and easy, clockwise around the corral.

Dorrie hasn’t been on a horse in years. Doubtless Hammer would have allowed her if she’d asked, but the truth is she dislikes riding. Taking to horseback means taking to the open. A body has to be content to progress across a valley bottom like a stitch across a massive quilt, having no fear—no notion, even—that at any moment the quilt might buckle into smothering folds.

Dorrie knows full well a field can’t swallow her. Knows it and doesn’t, all at once.

Chances are she never would have climbed onto the paint’s back if Papa hadn’t insisted she do something to put a little colour in her cheeks.
Little wonder she looks like the dead up and walking. Does she ever even set foot outside?

Mama took the time to join her long after Dorrie was proficient enough to ride out on her own. Notwithstanding a dearth of
sidesaddles on the property, Lyman Burr expected a lady to ride like one. Dorrie’s unease doubled when her seat was off-kilter. Sensing this, Mama held a trot until they were out of Papa’s sight, then slowed to a stop so the pair of them could rearrange themselves astride.
Better, my girl? Now you can get a proper grip
.

Mama knew to avoid the open without ever being told, keeping to the maze of cottonwoods or making brief, speedy bursts between clots of scrub. Dorrie followed close, tucked deep in her drooping bonnet. Whenever she felt a wash of panic, she stared hard at a spot midway down Mama’s back. More often than not, Mama would turn in her saddle and smile.

Coming back to herself, Dorrie finds she’s flattened her back to the workshop door. Her eyes refocus on horse and rider just as Drown presses Bull into a trot. It’s something to see. Normally an eye-rolling, lip-flaring mess, the palomino obliges him with a steady three-beat stride, ears forward, head high. For a good half-circuit. And then he shies.

Drown holds to the animal like a second tail, rippling along its length but firm at the bony root. He clings fast while Bull skips and reels, eventually quieting him to a shuffle. Sliding down from the saddle, the new man resembles nothing so much as a bucket of some dark liquid upturned. He takes a few steps and crouches, his hand disappearing in the grass. Behind him, Bull holds rigid, wheezing his fear.

When Drown rises, he does so slowly, in his hand a long black stick. He lays it flat across both palms, taking a narrow step then another toward the horse. He says nothing—at least nothing loud enough to reach Dorrie’s ears—yet his meaning is crystal clear.
A stick, see? Only a stick. No snake here
. Bull understands him, too. Relief passes over his handsome bulk, redrawing him in kinder lines.

Drown hurls the stick hard and far, his arm flailing. End over end, it cuts a fluid arc, disappearing as it crests the fence. He remounts with a spring, Bull catching him in the grasp of his back and breaking into a joyful run. Dorrie stares after them. There’s no denying the evidence of her own two eyes. Under a new man, the palomino is a whole new beast.

IN THE HEYDAY
of the gold rush, San Francisco drew hard men from the far corners of the globe. Australia, land of red earth and venom, gave up some of its worst—abused, brutal men known about town as Sydney Ducks. Others came steaming from the green wedge of continent to the south, still others from the eastern states, a land cankered with civility, rotten with farms. In a few short years the golden city had nursed up an underworld to be reckoned with. Eight-year-old John James walked softly, grew eyes in the back of his head.

Neither strong nor particularly fleet of foot, he learned to adopt the ways of the crabs he looked down on for hours from the wharves. Snatch what you need. Scuttle short distances. Hide. It became a kind of genius—the spring and give of his limbs extending clear up to his brain, his kelp-green eyes. He was forever scanning, picking out shadows that told of unoccupied space. They were everywhere once a body started looking—here between piles of siding, there among coils of jute. The shape of each potential refuge registered internally, dimensions translating into terms of his own design. Elbows hooked around ankles, knees tucked behind ears.

Hiding was what he should have done—would have done if he’d had his wits about him—the day he came face to face with the stray. But his wits were on holiday, taken up with a good half panful of pork and beans, slung out in a clot on a refuse pile, out back of one of the better rooming houses in the district. Rich with a bubbly sheen, the beans had clearly turned. Not so far gone they wouldn’t stay down, though. The mountain man had served up worse.

They called to John James, a slow-slipping, come-hither ooze. He felt his saliva run and pool, and, in the keen pleasure of anticipation, let a trickle escape his thin smile.

Looking up, he found his expression mirrored by a dripping grey muzzle, a pair of narrowed eyes. The dog stood equidistant to the beans, assuming the third point in the ancient triangle of human, beast and food. It bared a pink reef of gum, eased out a snarl. John James glanced about for a hidey-hole, but aside from the muck of the refuse pile, the lane stood solid, flooded with light. Garbage could cut you, seep poison into the wound—he’d nearly lost a foot that way only a month before. Besides, his guts were twisting with hunger. And he’d gotten there first.

He saw now the stray was a bitch, bald black nipples dragging low. He met her gaze. She bristled, took a stiff-legged step his way. He allowed rather than willed what happened next—his malnourished corpus pitching forward, assuming another’s form. Arching his spine, he felt the transformation take. As near as any human being could, John James turned himself into a dog. He knew it. The bitch knew it. She winded him, turned tail and ran.

John James woofed. He was weighing his next move—whether to rise up and stride manfully to the prize, or keep low, gobble and growl—when he heard an unfamiliar sound. It was a pair of hands
meeting, a hard, happy racket that echoed the bright length of the lane. The doorway to the rooming-house kitchen stood wide. A woman in a fat-soaked apron came close to filling its frame.

“Clever, clever.” She left off clapping. “Never seen the like.”

John James stood warily, wiped his paws—his palms—on his britches. When the woman shifted out onto the stoop, he took a matching step back.

“Don’t run, child.”

The word arrested him.
Child
. Of course. Not a dog. Nowhere near a man.

“You live round here?” she said.

He stood quivering.

“Hungry?”

He bit back a grin. Talent could do more than save your skin. It could fill your belly, too.

He was drawn to the company of women long before he ever dreamt of holding one in his arms. Kate Blakey, the rooming-house mistress who’d applauded his first-ever trick, had rewarded him with enough bread and bacon to choke a pig that day and several since. On fine mornings, he’d sit on the stoop by the trash pile. When it was raining, she’d let him inside to eat by the stove. He knew better than to wear out his welcome—once a fortnight or so kept her glad to see him.

Other times he would wander to the foot of Telegraph Hill, skirting the violence of Sydneytown to wind his way through the tents of Little Chile. The women there hadn’t much to give, but buckling himself down into a roosterly strut and scattering their chickens generally earned him a bowl of spicy soup. That and an hour or two in the light of their keen laughter, the sound, rather than the sense, of their talk.

He’d been alive for a full decade when he came within spitting distance of Red Meg, a rare beauty whose company commanded a staggering sum. John James was on his back on the boardwalk, ankles knotted behind his head. He’d drawn a small crowd that afternoon—seven miners, a merchant and a man in black who was likely a preacher of some kind. Meg came up catlike, the only sound the sudden rush of nine men sucking air. They opened a chink in the circle for her skirts to fill. Eyes the colour of whisky, comfort and havoc in one. A weight of copper curls. John James caught his breath along with the rest of them. He craned his neck upward, gaping at her over the twin points of his behind.

“Bendy.” She spoke softly, thoughtfully, as though the two of them were alone. “Bendy boy.”

“You know that one, Meg?” one of the miners said into his beard, breaking the spell. The rest of them laughing their relief.

Meg’s yellow eyes turned to glass. She let the howls die down as she smoothed the green silk about her ribs. “Open your purse and find out.”

To a man, even the one she’d bested, they roared. Red Meg drew back with a kind of curtsy, swivelled and sailed away. John James let go the pose, rolled up and hugged his knees. Around him the men howled on.

“Bendy,” he whispered to his kneecaps, and smiled.

DORRIE DREAMS:

Clearly the child is strong. Witness how she clung to the dark mother, her bold, slithering escape. Then there’s the force with which she holds me to this stunted oak, making my feathered body a black mark above her huddled form. True, I’ve flown a few slow loops over the greater scene, but each time she drew me back to her, her pull like the call of a mate, or larger—the call of the roosting place, the flock.

Being crow, I should make my way back to the killing field. I might have to haunt the margins for a time if the humans are still at work. On my last circuit I winged all the way back to the circled wagons. Between here and there, the dog man’s pack hunkered over the dead. They were stripping the bodies, revealing even the blue-white underskins of their feet. One yanked a glitter-string from a female’s wrist. One plucked shimmer-discs from an overskin he’d peeled away. The crow eye sparked and buzzed.

A third sank to his knees as I flapped over his head. He regurgitated heavily into the grass, though there was no sign of him
having partaken of the kill. They tend not to feed on their own kind, or on other predators, come to that. Someone should tell them the flesh of a meat-eater is more storied—veins of every creature it’s run to ground still marbled throughout.

Some Originals stooped alongside the pack members, others gone to gather up the cattle and horses they ran off into the hills some nights since. How is it the freed beasts don’t know to keep running? They wait only for their hearts to slow, then forget their captors, drop their noses into the green and feed. Herbivores. So often at a loss in the face of the true nature of things.

Such waste, such feast the humans leave behind. Those inner skins exposed to the sun, great softener, great opener of the dead. It remains to be seen how long they will protect their kill, standing over it jealously like wolves. At least the silver ones desire the flesh for their own consumption and, once sated, will often share. When humans kill humans, they cache every scrap, cry bloody murder if any creature dares dig it up.

Were I to alight on one of those bodies, they’d welcome me like a plague. I might manage to hop to its chin, slip the fine tip of my beak beneath an eyelid. I might even pierce the rich salt jelly, but before long one of them would cast the first of many stones. So unjust. They’ll never unearth the cache themselves, so why not let the other blood-lovers feed? Still, eventually night will fall. The humans will build a fire and cower round, or, better yet, beat a hasty retreat back to their lairs.

The pattern of bodies shows the killing was swift. Here and there lie signs of a few short chases, bursts of panicked speed, but most fell not far from where they were surprised. The females and their walking young form a loose flower head, fully blown. Some distance away, the line of fallen men marks the poor bloom’s severed stem. It’s a picture rendered all the more striking
by sprays and welters of blood. To pick a path between the corpses would be to wet my claws, to paint a tail-feather trail.