Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel (45 page)

“Him? Oh that’s Jethro. He’s
innocent,” Tolliver grinned. “He says he don’t belong here at all. Spent his
first two days here in the crazy hole telling everybody all about it. Swore he
didn’t even know how he got to Arizona. I tell you, I’d like a swallow of
whatever he had.”

Jaimenacho snickered and Parker
laughed wheezily through the gaps in his teeth and gathered up the cards.

“They caught him drunk, tryin’ to
buy a ticket to Californey with somebody else’s check at the train station,”
said Parker. The mention of trains fouled his mood then, and he spat on the
floor.

“Well it looks like you get the top
bunk, pard,” Tolliver said, angling his thumb upward. “Mind you don’t step on
neither of us gettin’ up to use the piss pot in the middle of the night.”

The Rider looked over to a corner of
the room where a tin pot sat beneath a halo of flies, circling like miniature
buzzards. He turned and threw his pillow and sheets on the top bunk. The sound
made the man sleeping on the third tier bunk across the room stir.

“Put your socks over your shoes at
night and you’ll keep the roaches and scorpions from curlin’ up in ‘em,”
Tolliver said. “We all work the stone quarry, so I imagine you will too, unless
you can do something special.”

“What do you mean?” the Rider asked.

“Like Jethro there. He’s a tailor.
Sews lacey stuff for the Yuma ladies that come to the flea market every Sunday,
so they spare his precious hands the rest of the week.”

“That ain’t exactly so,” said
Parker. “They do put him to work patchin’ up britches and sewin’ shirts in the
Yard Office.”

“Oh right,” said Tolliver, rolling
his eyes. “Hard labor.”

The Rider looked around the cell. It
was actually a strap iron cage encased in granite and adobe. No digging through
that. The only way out was the locked door. There was a single thick ring set
into the middle of the floor inexplicably. The bunks creaked and groaned when
he mounted, the green painted wood dry and flaking. With the dungeon-like
acoustics of the outer corridor, any movement at all would likely echo up and
down the whole cellblock in the still of the night.

“Talk about hard labor,” said
Parker. “I wonder when Captain Meder’s comin’ back already. I’m too old to be
out on the damn rockpile, and I’m tired of getting’ woke up for Laird’s
midnight jobs.”

“Laird is a bastard alright,”
Tolliver said. “Man’s got so many sidelines goin,’ hirin’ us out to them cheap
bastards down in Yuma, puttin’ us to work in the middle of the night on his
schemes, he ought to be in here with us. But, he says everybody works. ‘Cept
for the Incorrigbles. And Jethro there.”

“
Capitan
Meder, he is taking in the California sun,” said Jaimenacho, pillowing his
head with his hands and staring at the sagging bottom of Jethro’s bunk with a
smile. “Dipping his toes in the cool ocean. If I was him, I’d never come back
here to this goddamned place.”

The Rider reached his cot and
grimaced. The tick mattress was crawling with bugs. He flicked a few away into
the dark corners of the cell, then took his pillow back in disgust and shook it
out, snapping the case.

“Got some friends up there waitin’
for you?” Parker sneered. “Talk to Jethro when he wakes up. We got us a special
method for dealin’ with them in here.”

“I’m awake now,” Jethro said to the
wall he was facing.

The Rider froze in mid-descent from
the bunk at the sound of Jethro’s voice. It was jarringly familiar.

“I’m supposed to sleep with all your
schmoozing
?” He turned on his side
and faced them. “Feh! Like a bunch of
yentas
, you
shtunks
are.”

The Rider stared at the man on the
bunk, and an involuntary tremor began deep in his chest and spread outwards
into his extremities. Jethro. It wasn’t an uncommon name, but he had heard it
so recently. How had it escape his attention now?

That curly reddish beard, the thick
eyebrows, flecked with grey, the high, wrinkled forehead, swelling with
knowledge, he had always thought of it. The greenish eyes, even the patient,
indulgent pedagoguery of his thin lipped smile as he swung his lean legs out of
the bunk and produced a little bottle from his left shoe.

“Arsenic,” he said, still smiling. “I
swiped it from the commissary. They use it to kill the rats. Here. Just
sprinkle a little bit on your cot during the day and shake out your sheets
before you lay down.”

He smiled conspiratorially and
tossed the little bottle to the Rider, but the Rider made no move to catch it.
It bounced off his chest and tinkled across the floor loudly.

Jethro.

“Hey,” said Parker, snatching it. “Be
careful with this stuff. We only got a little bit.”

“
Oye
,
what’s the matter with him?” said Jaimenacho.

How long had he searched the earth?
How many years? To find him here. Here, in this dungeon, a million miles from
anywhere, smiling at him as if nothing had ever passed between them.

Jethro Auspitz. The name Kabede had
read beside Adon’s in the Order’s
Book of
Life
.

To
find Adon here!

He closed the distance between them
in no time. He planted his foot on Parker’s bunk and in one lunge vaulted up
and grabbed Adon by the collar of his shirt. He had always been a frail looking
man, but his frailty had not bespoken the inner power he had commanded. He was
older, and that mirage of frailty had grown, but there was no question.

This
was
Adon!

The older man registered a verbal
squawk of surprise as the Rider dragged him from the top bunk and turned,
smashing him face first into the floor, ignoring the agony it shot through his
taped fingers.

The other prisoners leapt away in
shock as the Rider straddled the older man and gripped the curling short hair
at the back of his head, pulling his bloodied face up from the floor and
wrenching it back so his blinking eyes could see him.

“Don’t you recognize me,
rabbi
?” he snarled in Aramaic, and spat
into the man’s face.

“Wh-who? Wh-what?” Adon spluttered
in English, lips dribbling blood.

The Rider drove his face into the
iron ring. Something cracked, and three broken teeth skittered across the
floor.

The Rider pulled the head back to
look into the mashed and bloody face again.

Adon’s eyes were rolling, his
battered mouth opening and closing, drooling blood.

The Rider faltered.

In that moment the Mexican,
Jaimenacho, sprang from the bunk and tackled the Rider off the prone man. The
Rider fell under him, scraps of Adon’s hair gripped between his fingers, as
Tolliver ran to the door and pressed his face through it and began hollering
for the guards.

“Help! Help! The new fella’s killin’
Jethro!”

The Rider bucked and fought to break
Jaimenacho’s grip. The Mexican was strong, and sought to drag him to the back
of the cell, and so he kicked at the senseless Adon, catching him in the ear
with the heel of his shoe, rocking his head back.

“Hah? Don’t you recognize me? Hah?
Moser
!”

In their struggle, the chamber pot
overturned, drenching them both with filth and urine.

The Mexican cursed. It was too much
for him. He flung the Rider into a corner and stood up, shaking his arms in
disgust, peeling his dripping shirt off.

The Rider hit the hard wall and took
a moment to shake coherence back into his dashed skull.

In that moment the footsteps that
had been pounding down the cellblock since Tolliver began yelling came to a
shuffling halt in front of their cell. There was a clank and the door groaned
open, Tolliver jumping back and flattening himself against the wall with his
hands raised as Croc O’Doyle came charging in with his rifle.

The Rider leapt at Adon again and O’Doyle
checked him in mid air with the barrel of Winchester across his face. The front
sight had apparently been filed, for it opened up a tear on his left cheek. The
impact and the hot blood settled his rage momentarily, and he felt himself
dragged out of the cell by his ankles.

Two guards were kneeling on his
chest and arms, and others were running past into the cell.

Croc O’Doyle sauntered out, glaring
down at him.

“Dark Cell it is,” he said, and to
prevent further struggling, lashed out at him with the butt of the rifle.

It struck the Rider above the eye
and his head bounced off the stone. His overwhelmed brain doused the lights.

The Rider did not entirely realize
he was awake when at last he did wake. If not for the gritty sensation of the
stone beneath him and the dime-sized shaft of silver light coming down from the
ceiling to pierce the otherwise total blackness, he would have contentedly
continued to believe O’Doyle’s blows had put him in a coma.

Then again, perhaps they had. His
head surely suffered an all encompassing ache that started at the top of his
head and pulsed down to the base of his skull when he tried to move.

He had no idea how much time had
passed, where he was, or what time of the day it was.

He opened his eyes as wide as he
could. The little light to his left actually hurt to look at, so he turned away
from it. It was cool here. There was a noxious scent in the air, but it wasn’t
as close or powerful as it had been in the cell. He put out his hand and
tentatively stretched his arm as far as it would go, only just brushing against
a rocky wall with his straining fingertips.

Was he in a room? The wall was hewn
stone, not smooth like the granite cell. Was he underground? In some kind of
cave?

He rolled on his side and dragged
himself across the ground. It took several minutes before he could finally
press his body between the floor and the wall.

He felt his face. It was crusted
with dried blood, and there was a puffy, scabbed over furrow on his cheek.

He closed his eyes and waited for
the ringing in his head to cease.

It did not totally, but when it had
dwindled to an echo, he slowly sat up with his back to the hard, jutting wall
and drew up his knees, resting his face forward on them.

His head seemed to weigh thirty
pounds.

He sat that way for a long time, and
then, when his aching brain suspended between his knees could spare the energy
to consider, he thought about what had happened.

It didn’t make sense that Adon was
lying in a Yuma jail cell, pilfering arsenic to fight the bed bugs of a bunch
of convicts.

But the Rider knew Adon as he knew
no other. Though he had not seen him in over a decade, his face, his voice were
etched into his brain. The image of the man had gone ahead of him always, like
a carrot dangling from a stick. It just wasn’t possible he had been mistaken.

Was it some game Adon was playing?
Some twisted trick? Had he allowed himself to be arrested for some minor
offense and somehow manipulated events so that they had wound up cellmates? Why
would he do such a thing?

It was quite possible that Adon
could have anticipated his coming to Yuma. He got the sense that Lilith and her
children had perhaps been pursuing him independently of Adon’s wishes, but Adon
surely knew of their feud. How could he have known the Rider would be arrested,
though? And what could he possibly hope to gain by goading him into an attack?
Compounding his sentence? No, as the perceived murderer of an innocent woman,
an attack on a fellow convict wasn’t going to make things much worse for him.

Books and O’Doyle had both mentioned
a Mister Laird. Who was he? Whoever he was, it was he who was responsible for
the Rider coming to the prison. Adon could have manipulated this Mister Laird.
But again, why? The Rider had nearly killed him on sight. He had surely done
him grievous injury.

His head began to ache again, and he
lay back down on his side, letting his pounding temple rest against the cool
stone.

Jethro was the name Kabede had read
in the Order’s
Book of Life
. The
false name Adon had enrolled under years ago. Jethro Auspitz. That was
irrefutable.

There was something wrong about Adon.

There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in
the Rider’s mind that the man who the others knew as Jethro was Adon, but why
had he pretended not to know him? Did he think the Rider would refrain from
attacking him around the other prisoners?

Let him get out of this black hole…then
he’d see.

He cursed himself for not having
broken Adon’ scrawny neck when he had the chance.

Would he have another?

Something else nagged at him.

Adon’s demeanor had been different.
Now that he was removed from the passion of their encounter, he could see it.
The Rider had been incensed by his appearance, but his inflections, his
mannerisms, they were wrong. Not assured and haughty as his old teacher’s had
been. The man in the cell had been too facile, too likable; too folksy. Adon
had always disdained the use of colloquialisms in his speech. He had told the
Rider once that he found them unbecoming in a scholar, and he had actively
discouraged the Rider from salting his speech with the little Yiddish phrases
and words he had picked up from his family and friends. Almost always Adon had
spoken to him in the old Aramaic the Sons of The Essenes conversed in.