Six-Gun Snow White (10 page)

What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both turn into jokes. They both get told so often they become pantomime. And then worse.

Oh-Be-Joyful don’t last much past Montana Territory unterritorying and stating up. But you never leave a girl behind. They join up with a wild west show and tour flat-dead towns on scrub-dust rivers. Not the big show, Bill’s show, but one nearly as good. They earn their dinners. The trick shots Little Mab and Bang-Up pull off look just like magic. What Woman Without a Name does with a horse would shame anyone who dared call himself a cowboy which truth be told is not too many people anymore.

And they have a pair of aces. A curiosity unequaled. It goes in the freak show because no one knows what else to do with it, and Boss Jake says it gives him the crawling creeps.

A little while back someone else showed up asking after work, though everybody but the lions knew he was just looking for their funny little curiosity. That kid was a much better get than the old box anyway, with those deer legs that could outrun a horse. Spends most of his nights in the freak tent with the box, talking to it like it can talk back. Talking funny. Maybe it’s French or something. Boss Jake knows he’s got a genuine cryptozoo on his hands, so he lets Deer Boy do whatever he wants. Only he says it
cripplezoo
because Boss Jake ain’t too bright and learned his words off his daddy’s bad mouth.

If you pay your nickel you can see it easy enough. Read the nice red sign up there:
The Glass Gunslinger
. And there she is: a glass box wrapped up in some old mangy coyote pelts and inside it there’s a girl. Sort of pretty, or she would have been if she hadn’t run herself so hard when she could run. Jake reckons she’s Choctaw or Cree or something and he don’t care when Woman Without a Name tells him she’s half-Crow and half-son-of-a-bitch.

Don’t look Snow White to me nohow.

Bang-Up Jackson makes sure the gunslinger’s hair looks nice before shows, crosses her arms over her chest with a big crazy pistol all pigged up in jewels in one hand and a long hog-sticker rifle in the other. Keeps her face clean. Keeps the flies off.

The gunslinger isn’t dead, but she don’t move and she barely breathes, so in summer she don’t smell too nice and the flies come singing. That’s when the Joyful girls—the furies, Jake calls them—take her out of her box and wash her in whatever’s handy. They let the Deer Boy help and the way he holds her head you’d think he’d married her before she got put in that box.

Old Epharim catches Deer Boy kissing the gunslinger once. Standing there with the box open and crying while he kissed her red, red lips. Nothing and no one troubles the old bear. She let them alone, though she didn’t feel right on it considering he was a stranger and Bang-Up would have both those pretty deer legs bust out if she knew. But what does it matter? Been twenty years now and Snow White don’t look a day older, don’t ever sit up and ask for whiskey in her coffee, don’t do nothing but beat her heart and work her breath.

Deer Boy kisses Snow White again.

She doesn’t wake up.

Deer Boy stands over the glass gunslinger one night in autumn. Everything smells like woodsmoke.

He puts his hands on the glass of her box. Leans in. Deer Boy can see himself in the glass. He can see her through him.

Deer Boy’s heard his mother’s sick back home. The lunger, maybe. But she’s old, so it doesn’t matter what it is. When she coughs it comes up red as apples. It has occurred to him that he should go to her. If he brought her what she wanted, she might heal up. Might look at him and say:
what a good boy.

Deer Boy brought a knife with him. He holds it between himself and Snow White.

I need your heart.

He opens the glass. Snow White is warm. He ran so far and now he runs alongside her. Keeping pace. Keeping time. He doesn’t try to understand things anymore. Deer Boy just loves like a light bulb and he never goes off.

“It looks like a choice,” he says to her soft as falling, “between you and me. But it isn’t.”

When the words come out they run backwards.

Deer Boy drags the knife over his chest. He is giving her his heart. He is exchanging a deer’s heart for a girl’s heart. If hers would fix him, his will fix her. He knows it. She isn’t his sister. She is his sister.

Deer Boy sees her eyelids move. He thinks he sees it. He’s sure he sees it.

Boss Jake hauls him back yelling for help. Hauls him off of her and Deer Boy is crying, he is begging her to wake up.
She’s dead, she’s dead, you can come back now.

The furies clean him up. He didn’t cut deep enough. Never could. No damage done. Snow White don’t move a whisper.

Deer Boy’s blood seeps into her white calfskins like snow.

Well, there’s only two ways this can end. Snow White wakes up; Snow White sleeps forever. Maybe that’s her thing. She’s always waking up and always sleeping at the same time all the time, so fast you can’t see the blur.

Maybe she never wakes up. More likely than anything else, really. You can’t kiss a girl into anything.

Snow White becomes an object. Barnum buys or steals her from Jakob’s show and she cools her heels with the Fiji Mermaid in perpetuity. A medical museum. A private collector with a scar on his chest. Maybe someday Snow White’s cells get scraped and stored for some researcher to kiss alive in a decade, a century, when they get around to it. When they have time.

She dreams of the mine. Of rubies hanging in the dark like antibodies. She dreams of her mother singing to her like a gun. She dreams of her mother when she was a girl, and didn’t know the future. If you want to know.

You know, there’s this old story. It says Coyote took his heart and cut it in half. He put one half right at the tip of his nose and the other half at the end of his tail. He did this so no one could catch him at his mischief. The two halves of his heart would fly off in separate directions, each doing whatever it pleased, and if anyone said to one half of his heart:
you have done a wicked thing!
the other half would say:
what the hell you talking about, I was over here the whole time!

Alive and dead, alive and dead. Both happening so fast you can’t see the blur. It doesn’t matter which. The live girl carries around the deadness she worked on all those years. The dead girl holds on to that wick of living that’s still green in there. It flips back and forth forever like a trick ace.
Thump, thump, thump
in the night as a girl sits up and lays down again.

Come on. Pick one.
Pick a path and hit the briars.

Thump, thump, thump.

One thing I have learned about running away is that once you start there is no end to it.

Open, shut. Alive, dead. Sooner or later you choose. This is what happens.

Snow White dreams about old red Thompson the fox and the spinning trees on her slots, red and gold and green and white. She dreams about the seagull with a bullet through its eye. If you want to know.

She dreams Mrs. H palms up that deck again. And this time she takes the cut. Aces high.

And all right, okay, one day she wakes up. It’s a hundred years, a hundred and ten, maybe some change. Stowed away in some attic in Iowa where Jakob’s Exhibition of Wildness and Wonder petered out. She wakes up because there was flooding all over town that spring and the current washed that house clean off its stones. Snow White wakes up when her glass box crunches against an elm tree and goes accordion shaped. Or maybe it was just time. Some clock ticked out inside her. Four old trees spinning up to spring.

There’s glass in her hair. In her palms.

Search and Rescue airlifts Snow White and half the town clear of the whitewater and nobody thinks much of it. A man with a crew cut treats her for shock. He asks how many fingers. Who’s President.

Snow White sees a taxidermied horse float down Beech Street and she knows it’s Charming. There’s a piece of glass in her nipple, poking out like a drop of milk that never fell. Right over her heart.

Snow White gets a social security card. She gets a job building houses out in California. Picks oranges. Doesn’t talk about herself. Never did. If you press her she’ll say she lost everything in the flood and she supposes that’s true. She goes to see the castle by the sea and it’s a museum now. Pictures on the wall: the Mr. Buttons. Miss Enger. Mr. H.

Mrs. H.

The pictures are black and white and Snow White finds no answers there or any comfort either. They just look like dead people and that’s what they are. Her room is labeled:
guest quarters
and she supposes that’s true, too. Up in the hills, the boardwalk is not open to visitors. Under construction. Renewal efforts funded by a grant from the state. Excellent example of turn-of-the-century follies.

In the forest Snow White sees a red fox. He looks at her for a long time. She tosses him an apple. Little fellow sniffs but he knows better. Good boy. Good boy.

Snow White likes the open sky. It’s the same as it ever was. Fire and cold. Long empty spaces between the stars, stars like towns getting their grips into a big black country. Oh-Be-Joyful. Haul-Off. Blue Coffin. There’s red up there like rubies in a mine.

Snow White gets a doctorate in physics though it takes her about fifteen years. She sleeps with a couple of lab partners but it’s pretty uninspiring stuff. She meets a history professor. He walks with an odd wobble. His students make fun of the way he talks—but they make fun of her drawl, too. Snow White does not think much of students. She waves at the professor when she passes by his classroom. Waves through the little glass window. He puts up his hand to hers. Snow White decides to take him to dinner. Find out his story. When she has time. There’s so much to do.

The telescopes open up to the sky like gardenias at a wedding.

Whoever’s left standing has won.

Snow White discovers a new pulsar out in the Horsehead Nebula. She listens to it through machines that reflect her face.

Thump, thump, thump
.

Talking mirrors on every wall.

Thump, thump, thump
.

Snow White’s pulsar shakes the night sky like iron shoes dancing.